Why should contemporary political scientists study Shakespeare’s Macbeth? Most obviously, the play merits our attention for its vivid and insightful depiction of an important political phenomenon—one that is no less important for being nowadays seldom investigated, or even named, by professional political scientists. I refer, of course, to tyranny. Macbeth is judged a tyrant repeatedly in the play by various characters with whom the reader is invited to sympathize. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Shakespeare intends for us to share—and shares himself—these characters’ sense that in so naming Macbeth they are expressing a genuine insight into the character of his rule. It would seem that for Shakespeare, unlike for Hobbes, tyranny is more than just monarchy “misliked.”1 On the contrary, the play invites us to the conclusion that Macbeth’s rule is a cause of “woe” not only to his victims because it harms their self-interest, but to any “mind that’s honest”—to borrow an expression used by one character to describe perhaps Macbeth’s most egregious crime (IV.iii.196–97).2
In fact, Macbeth can be understood in part as a dramatic enactment, and implicit analysis, of tyranny as it was understood by the classical tradition of political philosophy. Roughly the first half of the chapter that follows pursues this argument, seeking to show how Shakespeare’s drama both illustrates the character of, and provokes reflection on the origins and consequences of, tyranny as it was understood by the classics. The second half of the chapter, however, proceeds to contend that the classical conception of tyranny does not fully comprehend the kind of evil to which Macbeth succumbs. Macbeth’s reign is to some extent recognizable as a classical tyranny, but it is also something more. In the end, Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers us an account of demonic evil, of not just the ordinary vice that pursues self-interest at the expense of others, but of the mysterious human capacity for an irrational and self-destructive wickedness.
According to Aristotle’s account in the Politics, tyranny is a deviant form of regime because the tyrant rules not for the well-being of the whole community but rather for his own interest.3 This seems to be true of Macbeth. His desire to be king has no reference whatever to the common good. To be sure, one could contend that Macbeth, at least at first, deserves to be king. The play begins with the realm convulsed by a rebellion mounted by disloyal nobles and aided by the King of Norway. According to the reports King Duncan receives, his forces have overcome the worst that fortune could throw at them largely because of Macbeth’s courage on the field of battle. Thus Duncan’s messengers speak to Macbeth of the day’s triumph as “thy success” (I.iii.90). Macbeth more than any other man is responsible for saving Scotland from defeat, humiliation, and foreign subjection. As Duncan himself says: “More is thy due, than more than all can pay” (I.iv.21).
Macbeth, however, is not Coriolanus. The two are similar in that they both appear to be indispensable men, men whose unequalled military prowess saves their communities from defeat. Unlike Macbeth, however, Coriolanus is convinced—as are most of his fellow citizens—that his valor entitles him to the highest office the city can offer. While Coriolanus is a citizen of a martial republic, Macbeth is the subject of a feudal monarchy. He thus inhabits a markedly different moral and political universe, one in which martial virtue is valued, but fealty is valued even more, where manly virtue compels admiration but creates no claim to office. Accordingly, in response to Duncan’s gracious praise, and his suggestion that he is in Macbeth’s debt, Macbeth proclaims the feudal understanding of the subject’s duty: “Your Highness’s part / Is to receive our duties: and our duties / Are to your throne and state, children and servants; / Which do but what they should, by doing everything / Safe to your love and honour” (I.iv.23–27). Of course, because Macbeth has already begun to desire the crown, one might suspect his sincerity. Nevertheless, even in his private ruminations Macbeth never says anything to contradict this view. It never occurs to him to think that saving the kingdom entitles him to be king. Rather, tyrant-like, he just wants it. Indeed, Macbeth practically names himself a tyrant, understood in classical terms, when he proclaims: “For mine own good / All causes shall give way” (III.iv.134–35).
Moreover, Macbeth’s rule, once underway, bears all the hallmarks of tyranny as described by classical political philosophy. Unable to trust his subjects, he must spy on them. At one point, he remarks to his wife on the absence of Macduff from a royal banquet. Wondering if Macduff has refused an explicit summons, Lady Macbeth asks, “Did you send to him, sir?” Macbeth’s response reveals the network of political espionage that he deploys against his own nobles: “I hear it by the way…. There’s not a one of them but in his house / I keep a servant fee’d” (III.iv.127–31).
Moreover, Macbeth must, like a tyrant, destroy his best subjects. The good King Duncan delights in honoring the worthy. He loads Macbeth with praise and makes him Thane of Cawdor, remarking to Banquo that he is “fed” in “his commendations” of Macbeth: “It is a banquet to me” (I.iv.55–56). Macbeth, however, makes a striking contrast as king. He, too, has a subject of extraordinary virtue: Banquo. According to Macbeth’s own assessment, Banquo “dares” much, and “to that dauntless temper of his mind, / He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour / To act in safety.” Such courage and prudence are praiseworthy and, one would think, useful in a subject. Yet Macbeth regards Banquo’s “royalty of nature” not with admiration but with fear; and he accordingly arranges his murder (III.i.48–53).4
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, however, is more than just a depiction of tyranny in action. It also follows a particular tyrannical career from its beginning to its end. It in fact introduces Macbeth before he has become a tyrant and thus allows us to follow his descent into tyranny. The play’s title identifies it as a tragedy, and its story conforms to the common tragic model: it shows us an otherwise admirable man brought to ruin by some flaw in his character. As the play opens Macbeth has won universal praise, but by its end he is the object of universal hatred. In addition, the play does not merely trace the external actions of the tyrant but also admits us to his inmost thoughts. Shakespeare therefore provides us an opportunity to seek the origins of tyranny in the soul of the tyrant and to consider the consequences of that tyranny for that soul.
What, then, are the origins of Macbeth’s tyranny? Tyranny is characterized by violence: the tyrant does violence to politics by disregarding the common good and perverting rule to his own advantage. And, because most human beings will resist such attacks on the common good, or at least on that portion of the common good dearest to themselves, the tyrant must do violence in a more obvious manner. To quell the resistance provoked by his violence to principles, he must do violence also to living persons. Macbeth puts such violence on blazing display. The play, however, also suggests, more subtly, that tyranny originates in a less visible kind of violence: violence against one’s own nature. Before performing any overt acts, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth take the first steps on the path of tyranny by doing violence to their own souls.
Macbeth experiences the murder of Duncan as an act of violence against himself. Indeed, he feels even the contemplation of such a murder as a kind of self-violation. Merely to entertain the “fantastical” murder in his “thought,” he finds, is to be confronted with a “horrid image” that “doth unfix my hair, / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, / Against the use of Nature.” In passing from consideration of murder to the actual resolution to do it, he continues to experience the same sense of doing violence to self. In his first decision to proceed, Macbeth says to himself: “The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be, / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (I.iv.52–53). That is, he will consent to the deed, even though he knows that he will not be able to approve it once accomplished. Macbeth later begins to recoil from this enterprise, but his resolution is stiffened by Lady Macbeth. Even here, however, he continues to view the act as something to which he must somehow force himself: “I am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat” (I.vii.80–82). And his repugnance certainly does not dissipate upon completion of the deed. Having come from killing Duncan, he speaks of his bloody hands as “a sorry sight”: “They pluck out mine eyes” (II.ii.20 and 57).
One commentator has suggested, based on a soliloquy in which Macbeth dwells on all the dangers involved in killing Duncan and usurping the throne (I.vii.1–28), that Macbeth was “worried only by practical considerations.”5 This view is, I think, refuted by the passages cited in the preceding paragraph, as well as by developments throughout the course of the play. Macbeth is not an amoral man. He is rather a moral man who does violence to his own moral nature in order to achieve what he wants. It is true that in this soliloquy Macbeth dwells on the perils that are likely to beset a usurper. Here he displays better foresight than his wife, who anticipates no such evils. It is also true that, in the subsequent dialogue, Macbeth finally consents to the murder once Lady Macbeth has persuaded him that they can get away with it (I.vii.75–81). Such speeches and actions, however, do not preclude the sincerity of Macbeth’s moral concerns. He is a complex man. Like anybody else he wants to preserve himself, but it does not follow that his moral qualms are superficial or mere pretense. In fact, such an account of his character is impossible to square with the facts that he is practically beside himself with grief after having killed Duncan, and that it continues to prey on his mind even after he is king, points to which we will return later. Indeed, were Macbeth simply an amoral pragmatist, it is difficult to see how he could be a fitting tragic subject, insofar as tragedy is thought to depict how an otherwise admirable man is brought to ruin by some flaw in his character. Macbeth is not only acceptable, but is so compelling as a tragic protagonist precisely because he is so morally sensitive yet at the same time so willing to do violence to his moral sensibilities.
Lady Macbeth presumably knows her own husband, and by her own words she affirms his moral seriousness, even as she views it as an obstacle to what they both desire. That is, she recognizes that violence will have to be done to his nature in order to carry out their project: “I fear thy nature: / It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness, / To catch the nearest way. Thou would’st be great; / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it; / what thou wouldst highly, / That wouldst thou holily; would not play false, / And yet wouldst wrongly win; thou’dst have, great Glamis, / That which cries, ‘Thus thou must do,’ if thou have it; / And that which rather thou dost fear to do, / Than wishest should be undone” (I.v.16–28). Lady Macbeth’s willingness to do violence to her husband’s nature in order to achieve her ends is, of course, unattractive. Her regard for what he is as a mere impediment to what she wants seems incompatible with any genuine love for him. On the other hand, she could be defended on the grounds that, after all, he, too, wants the end for which she is scheming. And, leaving aside all moral considerations, perhaps the violence she intends to perform on him could be understood as necessary to his own good, as a kind of surgery that will heal his incompleteness and satisfy his deepest longings. As she so accurately discerns, his nature is deeply conflicted: he wants incompatible things. If he is to enjoy any of the goods that he desires, violence will have to be done to some part of him. If he is to realize his desire to be kindly, holy, and true, he will have to mortify his ambition. If he is to realize his ambition, he will have to mortify his desire to be kindly, holy, and true. Therefore, in choosing to suppress some of his desires, she is acting, she believes, to secure what he most deeply desires. The tenability of such a defense of Lady Macbeth has to be judged in light of all that develops in the course of the play. For the moment, it suffices to note that it does not take long for signs to appear that she has misjudged her husband’s nature and therefore underestimated the degree of violence it must undergo to gain the crown. In the speech quoted above, she speaks of the murder of Duncan as something Macbeth fears to do but would not wish undone (I.v.24–25). Yet, immediately after having done it, he does wish it undone. Startled by a knocking at the castle’s south entry, he exclaims: “Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst!” (II.ii.72–73).
The tyrannical enterprise requires that violence be done to Lady Macbeth’s nature as well. She in fact expressly wills it. Contemplating her plans, she wishes that she might be “unsex[ed]” and so filled “from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty.” She wishes to stop in herself “th’access and passage to remorse; / That no compunctious visitings of Nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between / Th’effect and it.” She desires that in her “woman’s breasts” her “milk” be replaced with “gall” (I.v.41–48). She evidently believes that it is part of a woman’s nature to be tender and life-nourishing. She wills, in explicit violation of that nature, to be cruel and deadly.
One might doubt that here Lady Macbeth really does do violence to her own nature. She is not a very sympathetic character, at least at first; and she so eagerly calls for this ugly transformation that we may suspect that she has no womanly feelings of tenderness to begin with. Yet subsequent developments show that, while Lady Macbeth puts up a brave front, the bloody requirements of tyranny do in fact go against her grain. When they first begin to plan the murder, she tells Macbeth that he need only “look up clear,” or keep his face free from any suspicious signs: “leave all the rest to me” (I.v.71–73). In the end, however, Macbeth has to do the actual killing, and Lady Macbeth must take to drink to fortify her determination to go forward with the plot (II.ii.1–2). When Macbeth begins to hold back from the murder, she claims for herself a willingness to outrage her deepest feelings in order to advance their project: “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this” (I.vii.54–59). This is so shocking that it tempts the reader to view Lady Macbeth as a monster devoid of normal human feelings. Yet it is mere boast. When it comes to actually performing the murder, she is daunted by the mere reflection of a bond less deep than that of mother and child. Having sent Macbeth to kill Duncan, she reflects, “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t” (II.ii.12–13).
As the preceding discussion implies, the violence against oneself in which tyranny originates is not done for its own sake, but for the sake of an apparent good: the “golden round,” as Lady Macbeth calls it, the crown (I.v.28). This physical object, of course, is not desired for itself but for what Macbeth and Lady Macbeth believe will accompany it: the greatness to which they both aspire. They are united in ambition. Macbeth understands “vaulting ambition” as the only “spur” urging him on toward regicide (I.vii.25–26). Lady Macbeth approvingly attributes “ambition” to her husband, and she speaks as if she shares his ambition, or possesses it even more perfectly than he does (I.v.19). In his letter to her about the possibility of his becoming king, he addresses her as his “dearest partner in greatness.” He informs her of the “greatness” that is promised to her, advising her to “[l]ay it to thy heart” (I.v.11–14). He thus implies that the longing for greatness is something that lies close to both of their hearts.
The situation is more complex than these passages indicate, however, because Shakespeare’s vision of tyranny is keener than a first reading of the play might reveal. For while the play depicts two tyrannical souls united in a love of greatness, they are in fact drawn into tyranny by two distinct understandings of what greatness is. Here we may introduce as most useful Saint Augustine’s distinction between “the desire of human glory and the desire of domination.”6
Although Macbeth’s motivations are, again, complex, he appears to have much in him of the love of glory. This is the first consideration to which he turns when he tries to stop their conspiracy to murder Duncan: “We will proceed no further in this business: / He hath honour’d me of late; and I have bought / Golden opinions from all sorts of people, / Which should be worn now in their newest gloss, / Not cast aside so soon” (I.vii.31–34). Moreover, as his tyrannical career nears its close, Macbeth singles out his loss of glory for special lamentation: “I have lived long enough: my way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, 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” (V.iii.22–28).7
In contrast, Lady Macbeth appears to be much more a lover of domination. In urging Macbeth forward, she predicts that their murder of Duncan “shall give to all our nights and days to come / Solely sovereign sway and masterdom” (I.v.69–70). When Macbeth later takes up her suggestion that it will be thought that Duncan was murdered by the grooms of his chamber, she responds: “Who dares receive it other, / As we shall make our griefs and clamour roar / Upon his death” (I.vii.78–79). As we have just seen, it pains Macbeth to think that others hate him but “dare not” curse him openly. Lady Macbeth, however, seems indifferent to who suspects them, so long as their public grief is so ostentatious as to prevent anyone from questioning their contrived account of the crime. For her, their performance need not be convincing so long as it is sufficiently intimidating. Indeed, her concern with domination over honor is revealed even more clearly when, in the sleepwalking scene late in the play, she repeats something she has no doubt said to Macbeth: “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to accompt” (V.i.35–36)?
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are thus led into tyranny by two separate desires. Yet they are not exactly led separately. That is, they are propelled toward this same goal not only by the independent operation of these different desires on each soul, but also by the interplay of these desires in their relationship. She dominates him by manipulating his love of praise, and he seeks to maintain her good opinion of him by submitting to her domination. The early scenes in the play contain ample evidence that Lady Macbeth desires to dominate her husband. When she first anticipates his reluctance to use murder to advance himself, she wishes him present so that she can “chastise with the valour of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round”—“chastise,” we note, and not persuade (I.v.27–28). Later she proclaims: “The raven himself is hoarse, / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements”—a remark that says a good deal about who she regards as the master of the castle (I.v.38–40, emphasis added). Her willingness to dominate him, and her use of his love of praise as her primary weapon, are most obvious when she has to surmount his refusal to go forward with Duncan’s murder. “We will proceed no further in this business,” Macbeth resolves; yet his desire so to settle the issue does nothing to dissuade her. She responds by threatening to withhold her esteem, and implicitly denying his worthiness of the honor he has won in the recent rebellion. As a result of his military exploits, it has been said that Macbeth “deserves” to be known as “brave” (I.ii.16). His wife, however, rebukes him for being “afeard” to take what he wants, a failure for which he will have to recognize himself as a “coward.” She suggests that one who will not dare to do what he wants does not deserve to be called a man. She exhorts him to “screw” his “courage to the sticking place” for their venture, noting that they will be able to do whatever they want to Duncan when he is “asleep / (Whereto the rather shall his hard day’s journey / Soundly invite him)” (I.vii.39–64). Unable to bear such condemnation from his “dearest partner in greatness,” Macbeth submits. Moreover, in so doing he surrenders not only his judgment about a particular course of action, but even his standards of judgment. When she had initially attacked his manliness, he had responded by arguing that true manliness must be in the service of what is fitting, and not just whatever one happens to desire: “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more, is none” (I.vii.46–47). In the end, however, he agrees to what she wants, failing to note the obvious perversity of the courage to which she calls him, a “courage” that will kill a tired old man in his sleep.
The classical political philosophers contend that tyranny is bad for the tyrant as well as for his subjects.8 Macbeth bears out this understanding. As Macbeth and Lady Macbeth soon learn, and as Plato could have taught them, as tyrants they cannot even securely enjoy the external goods for which they stooped to tyranny in the first place. As we have already noted, Macbeth realizes near the end of his reign that love and honor are things that he “must not look to have.” Moreover, not even the power they win can be possessed in peace. Having become king, Macbeth reflects that “[t]o be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (III.i.47). Shortly, Lady Macbeth similarly laments, “Nought’s had, all’s spent, / Where our desire is got without content: / ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy, / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy” (III.ii.4–7). Paradoxically, this concern to secure their position drives Macbeth to even greater crimes, which in turn leads to his overthrow.
The argument developed in the course of this chapter, however, suggests an even deeper difficulty. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have done violence to their own natures, to their own souls or selves, to win external goods. This appears on its face to be a fool’s bargain, and so their experience of tyranny confirms. Alienation is one of the play’s themes. In doing violence to themselves, they alienate themselves from things with which they desire communion. At the same time, they cannot alienate these desires for communion, so that they experience their alienation as a lack, an incompleteness, and their lives as increasing emptiness and misery. They learn that they cannot simply switch off the parts of their souls that impede them from gaining what they want. The play suggests that one cannot do such violence to oneself without paying a dear price, a price dearer, perhaps, than that paid by the tyrant’s victims.
To begin with, tyranny estranges Macbeth and Lady Macbeth from each other. To be sure, this alienation is already implicit in the selfishness of their tyrannical desires. As we saw earlier, she begins her part in the play by regarding his nature—that is, himself—as a mere impediment to her quest for power. Later, Macbeth says, in his wife’s presence, “For mine own good / All causes shall give way”—a remark at odds with his earlier sense that she is his “dearest partner in greatness” (III.iv.134–35, I.v.11 ). At the same time, neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth is characterized simply by these selfish, tyrannical desires. On the contrary, as we have noted, they both possess deep moral inclinations that they violate by their actions. Yet, because of their crimes, the persistence of their moral natures serves only to deepen their estrangement. Again, Lady Macbeth failed to understand how deeply her husband would wound himself in murdering Duncan: “th’attempt and not the deed / Confounds us,” she says while waiting for Macbeth to return from his bloody work (II.ii.10–11). Yet subsequent events show that, contrary to her expectations, the deed itself continues to confound Macbeth, even after it is done, and this keeps them apart. After they have won the crown, they cannot enjoy sharing their high position, because Macbeth keeps to himself, brooding on his crime (III.i.8–12). Moreover, because they retain their essential moral natures, defiled but not destroyed, they find they cannot approve each other’s characters any longer. Macbeth’s disapproval of his wife appears after he has been terrorized by the ghost of Banquo, which he assumes she has seen as well. She rebukes him for his fear, and he responds: “Can such things be, / And overcome us like a summer’s cloud, / Without our especial wonder? You make me strange / Even to the disposition that I owe, / When now I think you can behold such sights, / And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks, / When mine is blanch’d with fear” (III.iv.109–15). The “disposition” he owes, of which he speaks here, is one of love for her. That is, her apparently heartless indifference to such a grievous spectacle estranges him from his love for her. He begins to find her hardness repellent. And Lady Macbeth apparently experiences a corresponding revulsion for him. Having arranged Banquo’s murder, Macbeth announces to his wife that during the coming night there shall be done “a deed of dreadful note.” She asks what it will be, and he responds with a chilling speech calling for darkness to come, when “Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” Lady Macbeth says nothing in response to this, yet she must react somehow with her face. For, observing her, Macbeth continues: “Thou marvell’st at my words: but hold thee still; / Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (III.ii.44–55). Given the hardness to which she had earlier urged him, we may be tempted to assume that here she is marveling with approval at the change in him. Yet the words of the speech cannot sustain this interpretation. Seeing her face, and apparently noting that she is about to say something, he tells her to keep still, and claims that things begun in evil make themselves stronger through more evil. It would make no sense for him to say such things to her unless he had detected a reluctance on her part to approve the dreadful deed that he is planning. She has sought to harden him, yet in the end she cannot approve the change she has wrought in his soul.
In addition, they are both haunted by their sense of alienation from God. This is true even of Lady Macbeth. She begins the play by disdaining her husband’s desire to act “holily,” and by wishing that the smoke of Hell might conceal her from the eye of heaven (I.v.21 and 50–54). By the end of the play, however, she is unburdening her troubled soul in sleep, revealing, among other fears, that “Hell is murky” (V.i.34). Similarly, when weighing the possible cost of murdering Duncan, Macbeth indicates that, if he could be assured of success, he would “jump the life to come” (I.vii.7). This remark expresses a willingness to disregard the afterlife, and hence God’s judgment on his actions; but at the same time indicates that Macbeth cannot leave these considerations completely out of his deliberations. He would not need to resolve to jump the life to come unless it were something he had hitherto taken with some seriousness. Moreover, subsequent events demonstrate that despite this desire to ignore the possibility of divine judgment, he cannot in fact do so. Immediately after the murder, he expresses his torment over this very question. Stealing away from the scene of his crime, he has overheard the sons of Duncan, one perhaps disturbed by some nightmare, wake in the next room, one crying, “God bless us,” and the other, “Amen.” Macbeth relates his reaction to his wife: “List’ning their fear, I could not say, ‘Amen,’ / When they did say, ‘God bless us … wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’? / I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ / Stuck in my throat” (II.ii.24–32). Here Lady Macbeth advises him to leave off such thoughts, since they will “make us mad”—indicating, again, that the idea of alienation from God is not one she disdains so much as one she cannot afford to confront (II.ii.33). Moreover, this fear of alienation from God continues to dog Macbeth after he has become king. Even while planning his murder of Banquo, he realizes that he has already given his “eternal jewel” to “the common Enemy of man”—that is, given his soul to the devil (III.i.67–68).
Finally, Macbeth’s tyranny alienates him from himself. In the first place, he is estranged from his own virtue. Macbeth is nothing if not a courageous man, as the reports of his martial heroics indicate. Nevertheless, by the end of the play he lives in constant fear of violent death (IV.i.82–100). His courage, moreover, is that of the straightforward man of action. The accounts of his deeds in the rebellion that opens the play contain no mention of any ingenious stratagems, but only of his dauntless heroism, his ability to prevail by attacking in the face of all possible misfortune. Tyranny, however, calls for guile and cunning. Macbeth is not suited to such things, and his need to attempt them goes against his grain. To Lady Macbeth’s disapproval, he leaves the supper they hold for Duncan just before they are to murder him (I.vii.29). He apparently cannot sit and make merry with a man whose murder he contemplates. Later, when he must conceal his hatred of Banquo, he complains of the necessity to “lave our honours in these flattering streams, / And make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (III.ii.33–34).
Ultimately, Macbeth’s self-alienation takes the form of an estrangement from the very possibility of self-knowledge. He cannot afford to know himself, so terrible are his crimes. Having killed Duncan, he forgetfully brings the daggers with him out of the chamber. When Lady Macbeth notices and asks him to return and plant these weapons with the sleeping stewards, he flatly refuses: “I’ll go no more: / I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on’t again I dare not” (II.ii.50–51). At the end of the same scene, he adds, “To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself” (II.ii.72).
The classical political philosophers teach that, among the external goods, honor is more dignified than power. Macbeth’s thirst for honor, however, wins him only a kind of power that denies him the honor he seeks. More profoundly, the classical political philosophers teach that the goods of the soul are more dignified, and more productive of genuine happiness, than external goods. Yet Macbeth’s quest for honor, and his acquisition of power, deprive him of the very goods of the soul that he, too late, implicitly recognizes as essential to his happiness. He attains a kind of greatness within his community, but at too great a cost within himself. He cannot be himself or know himself, and he cannot enjoy friendship with God or his own wife. As Plato’s Republic suggests, and as Macbeth’s career amply demonstrates, a man with power to rule a kingdom, but with no power to be happy, has nothing.
Although Macbeth’s career is to this extent recognizable as an example of classical tyranny, it cannot be fully understood simply in terms of the classical account. The tyranny diagnosed by the ancients is said by them to be unnatural in one sense, insofar as it perverts rule from its natural purpose: securing the common good. In another sense, however, such tyranny is perfectly natural. It is, after all, a commonly encountered political phenomenon, and to that extent a familiar aspect of the order of nature. Tyranny as the ancients understood it, moreover, has natural causes that we can readily grasp. It arises from the tyrant’s mistaken or unjust preference for his own self-interest over that of his community. But since, as Plato’s Socrates observes, the inferior parts of the soul are typically bigger and more powerful than reason, it is understandable that many human beings will have tyrannical desires and predictable that some will succeed in acting on them. On the ancient account, tyranny is like disease: it is a corruption of nature that nevertheless commonly occurs in nature and is intelligible in terms of natural causes. Macbeth, however, depicts a tyranny whose causes and character cannot be wholly understood in such terms. Rather, some supernatural evil appears to be at work in Macbeth’s tyranny.
After all, the play famously begins not with any choice of Macbeth’s but with the resolution of the three “weird sisters” to meet with him in order to tempt him with their prophecy that he will be king. Although their nature and motivations are never made entirely clear, it is reasonable to take them as agents of some kind of demonic evil. The text identifies them as “witches,” and in Shakespeare’s time a witch would be understood to be one who traffics with devils. Certainly Banquo suspects that they have diabolical connections (I.iii.107). In any case, the witches are presented as a force for a kind of inhuman evil. That is, they are characterized by a malice that seeks evil for no discernible human motive. From their very first appearance, the witches betray a strange detachment from ordinary human allegiances. They agree to meet “When the hurlyburly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won” (I.i.3–4). Ordinary human beings do not think of a battle as being simultaneously “lost and won,” because they experience some tie of loyalty to one side or the other that leads them to view the outcome as either a victory or a defeat. The witches appear to acknowledge no such ties. As they conclude this first appearance, they announce that “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I.i.11–12). This remark bespeaks not the commonly experienced human evil that chooses bad means to attain good ends, nor even a nihilism that denies the distinction between good and evil. It rather expresses a desire to make the bad the good and vice versa. It is the expression of a mind in rebellion against the good, or one committed to evil for its own sake. Thus we find the witches, much later in the play, egging on Macbeth’s tyrannical inclinations—conjuring up apparitions that advise him to “take no care” who “chafes” or “frets” under his “bloody” rule—and doing so for no discernible benefit for themselves (IV.i.78–92).
Moreover, the witches cannot be written off as mere figments of Macbeth’s fevered imagination. True enough, Macbeth is given to seeing things that his other senses, and the senses of others, fail to register: the famous “air drawn dagger,” and the ghost of Banquo. One might accordingly suspect that his visions are mere projections of his own guilty mind. One cannot entertain such suspicions, however, in the case of the witches. In addition to being shown to the audience when Macbeth is not even present, they are seen by, and vanish before the eyes of, both Macbeth and Banquo at the same time (I.i, I.iii, III.v, IV.i). Whatever they are, the witches represent something other than Macbeth, a force acting on him from the outside, and animated by a malicious will.
Macbeth’s tyranny is unusual not only in its origins but also in its character, which also seems to go beyond the usual classical diagnosis. In his A Century of Horrors, French historian Alain Besançon contends that Soviet and Nazi leaders cannot be accurately understood as examples of the usual “criminal tyrants” of which “history offers numerous examples.” Rather, “as the most lucid people knew,” in these cases “the so-called tyrant was not a tyrant because he did not act with his personal good in mind. He was himself tyrannized by something of a higher order.”9 On this basis Besançon entertains (without embracing) the idea that such regimes were manifestations of demonic evil. Similarly, Macbeth’s violence is never directed by any sober assessment of his own interests. That is, Macbeth’s tyranny is irrational not only in the sense—developed earlier in this chapter—that it is ultimately incompatible with the full well-being of his soul. It is also irrational in the sense that his tyrannical actions are never calculated to reliably secure even his interests as they relate to his ambitious desires. He is aware that his tyrannical actions will sacrifice some of his desires to others; yet those very actions are not reasonably ordered to satisfy even the desires he chooses to pursue.
Shakespeare was aware of Machiavelli and of the character of his teaching.10 Moreover, there are recognizable echoes of Machiavelli in Macbeth. For example, after the murder of Duncan, his sons decide that they will be safer if they flee, recognizing, as Donalbain says, “the near in blood, / The nearer bloody” (II.iii.138–39). This remark manifests the Machiavellian sense that a new prince seeking to supplant an old one will need to see to it that the blood or the “line” of the previous prince be “extinguished.”11 When she is warned that she is in danger, Lady Macduff protests that she has “done no harm.” She immediately corrects herself, however, remembering that “I am in this earthly world, where, to do harm / Is often laudable; to do good, sometime / Accounted dangerous folly” (IV.ii.73–76). This speech recalls what is perhaps the core of Machiavelli’s teaching: that those who wish to preserve themselves must be able “to be not good,” that strict adherence to virtue may lead to one’s “ruin.”12
Macbeth himself, however, is no Machiavellian. His most fateful—and most wicked—decisions are taken without any sober calculation of his own interests. As was just observed, Donalbain expects that whoever is responsible for his father’s murder will also have a plan to extinguish Duncan’s “blood.” In fact, however, Macbeth has no such plan. When Duncan publicly proclaims his eldest son, Malcolm, as Prince of Cumberland and hence his successor to the throne, Macbeth recognizes it as an impediment to his aims (I.iv.48–49). Nevertheless, he never deliberates about this problem, and, indeed, never mentions it again. He instead proceeds with a murder that cannot of itself win him the kingship. In the event both of the sons of Duncan flee, thus calling suspicion upon themselves for their father’s murder, so that Macbeth is named as king. This outcome, however, is not one upon which he could have reasonably depended, and the play gives us no reason to think that he expected it. In Machiavelli’s terms, he owes his success more to fortune than to virtue, and he experiences the insecurity that necessarily results. Moreover, his failure to extinguish Malcolm leaves in place a legitimate successor to Duncan who desires the throne for himself and revenge for his father’s death, to whom dissatisfied subjects can appeal for aid, and upon whom foreign powers can bestow their support.
There is a similar, or even greater, irrationality in Macbeth’s decision to kill Macduff’s family. Visiting the witches for the last time, Macbeth is told that Macduff is, as he had suspected, a threat to him. He resolves to kill Macduff, but learns that he has gone to England. Macbeth then decides instead on the following course of action: “The castle of Macduff I will surprise; / Seize upon Fife; give to th’edge o’th’sword / His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (IV.i.150–53). It makes no sense from the standpoint of Macbeth’s own interest in securing his rule to destroy the family if he cannot also destroy Macduff at the same time. On the contrary, if he cannot reach Macduff, who therefore still poses a threat, Macbeth would surely be wiser to take Macduff’s family hostage, using the threat of their deaths to deter Macduff from any hostile action. To kill them while Macduff lives can only strengthen Macduff’s enmity and, moreover, strengthen his position by creating sympathy for him among his countrymen. As the story plays out these murders achieve for Macbeth nothing but these worse than useless ends. Macbeth, it seems, fails to appreciate the crucial Machiavellian distinction between cruelty well and badly used. His violence is not done at a single stroke in order to establish his rule, but it starts small and then grows. He has not reasoned out in advance all the harm that needs to be done in order to secure his position, but he improvises on the basis of hopes and fears that are fed by the witches’ prophecies. His career bears out Machiavelli’s claim that those who pursue such a course cannot maintain themselves.13 Indeed, as his career progresses, Macbeth more and more openly disclaims, in both word and deed, any kind of rationality in his actions. For example, in apparently first conceiving a plan to murder Macduff, he tells Lady Macbeth: “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, / Which must be acted, ere they be scann’d” (III.iv.138–39). And later, reflecting on Macduff’s flight and deciding to kill his family, Macbeth vows that “From this moment, / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand. And even now, / To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done” (IV.i.146–49).
Macbeth’s deeds, too, bespeak a radical repudiation of reason, insofar as many of his key actions not only are done without reasoning, but cannot even be reconciled with reason. This is most evident in his second consultation with the witches. Macbeth greets them as enemies—hailing them as “secret, black, and midnight hags”—while, they, for their part, openly mock at him during their meeting (IV.i.48). The supernatural counsel that they conjure up for him is self-contradictory, telling him both to “beware Macduff” and to “scorn the power of man,” assuring him that his reign is secure, yet advising him to bold action apparently with a view to securing himself (IV.i.70–80). Finally, disappointed by their confirmation that Banquo will father a line of Scottish kings, he pronounces a curse on the witches: “Infected be the air whereon they ride; / And damn’d all those that trust them” (IV.i.138–39). Yet Macbeth does trust them—despite all these signs of their untrustworthiness, and in defiance even of his own sense that they do not merit his trust. And this blind, irrational trust is followed by his decision, noted before, to lash out at Macduff in a blindly irrational manner. In sum, Macbeth’s violent career has a kind of desperation about it. It is based on a desperate belief in the prophecies by which he is manipulated. The character of his actions therefore differs considerably from those of a Machiavellian prince or classical tyrant. The latter must, admittedly, be a gambler. A taker of calculated risks, he must resort to crime in order to succeed, yet he knows he cannot have certainty of success. Macbeth, in contrast, resorts to crime without any reasonable hope of success. He acts not upon calculation but, one might say, upon inspiration—inspiration that is clearly not of a divine sort.
Macbeth’s crimes appear demonic not only in their irrationality—and hence their pointlessness—but also in their willfulness. As we noted earlier, Macbeth is not insensitive to the distinction between good and evil. Rather, he does violence to himself by choosing to do things he knows are morally repugnant. This knowledge of the true character of his deeds is present not only at the outset of his tyrannical career, but all the way through it, to its very end. To be sure, the play does record the desensitization of Macbeth’s moral feelings. He does not experience the same grief in murdering Banquo or the Macduff family as he did in killing Duncan. In fact, he acknowledges his loss of moral sentiment near the end of the play (V.v.8–15). This decline in moral feeling, however, does nothing to obscure his moral knowledge of the nature of his acts. Thus, even at the close of his tyrannical career, even after he has brutalized his soul by repeated acts of the utmost wickedness, he recognizes his crimes as crimes. Accordingly, just before his death, and as his tyranny is crumbling around him, he acknowledges that his “soul” is “charg’d” with the blood of Macduff’s family (V.viii.5–6).
There is a final sense in which Macbeth’s tyranny can be understood as demonic in character: not only does Macbeth clearly understand his crimes as crimes even as he is planning and executing them, he even acknowledges them as a kind of war against the cosmic order itself. Thus, in his final meeting with the witches, he commands them:
… answer me: Though you untie the winds, and let them fight / Against the Churches; though the yesty waves / Confound and swallow navigation up; Though bladed corn be lodg’d, and trees blown down; Though castles topple on their warder’s heads; Though palaces, and pyramids, do slope / Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure / Of Nature’s germens tumble all together, / Even till destruction sicken, answer me / To what I ask you. (IV.i.51–61)
That is, Macbeth will have what he wants, even if it requires all manner of violence to nature, and even if it unhinges the intelligibility of nature itself—confusing “Nature’s germens,” or the seeds of its various kinds of beings—thus making universal chaos out of universal order. Indeed, Macbeth has already indicated that even this account does not fully capture the astonishing extent of his rebellion. Earlier, contemplating his need to eliminate Banquo, he exclaims: “But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear” (III.ii.16–18). Macbeth is thus willing to tyrannize not only visible Nature itself, but even the invisible order supporting it—not only this world but the next. There is, of course, a deep irrationality in the will to such a tyranny. Like any man, Macbeth is a dependent, contingent being. He has his existence only within the “frame of things” that he is willing to “disjoint.” He is willing to harm the world itself as a means to his own good, but insofar as he is part of the world such harm can only result in harm to him as well.
Accordingly, as his story plays out, Macbeth suffers the most dire consequences of his demonic tyranny. As we have already seen, Macbeth understands himself to have gained nothing by his crimes. He had desired honor, but finds in the end that neither honor nor the other goods he had cherished are available to him. Although he clearly fears death, he admits to himself that he does not want his life to go on (V.iii.22). Yet it is in considering the demonic aspect of Macbeth’s tyranny that we come to appreciate more fully the nothingness to which it brings him: his striving for cosmic tyranny leads him to a sense of cosmic desolation. Learning of his wife’s death, he concludes that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” Learning moments later that the witches’ prophecies appear to be turning against him, he exclaims, “I ’gin to be aweary of the sun, / And wish th’estate o’th’world were now undone” (V.v.25–50). In the end, Macbeth concludes not only that he cannot have the good things of nature, but that nature has no good things to offer. He is haunted by a sense of the unintelligibility of things, and he wishes not just to leave the world, but for the world itself to end. As we have seen, Macbeth has himself gone so far as to will the sense of cosmic unintelligibility from which he now suffers. Moreover, this sense of the meaninglessness of things is necessarily implicit in his desire to subordinate nature itself to his desires. Again, Macbeth, like any man, is a contingent and dependent being. He is by nature a mere part of a larger whole. As such, any goods he can enjoy are only available to him in the context of the larger nature of which he is a subordinate element. He can only possess what is truly good for him by respecting his own nature, that of other natural beings that are distinct from him though related to him, and that of the natural whole to which they all alike belong. Put another way, the very possibility of goods to which he can aspire, and with which he can achieve the communion he desires, depends on the existence of an intelligible order of things that are good and meaningful precisely because they have an objective value apart from, and even superior to, himself. By subordinating the cosmos to himself, by turning it into a mere tool to gratify his desires, Macbeth drains it of all real meaning and goodness and thus leaves himself devoid of any possibility of happiness. Or rather, since the cosmos is in fact impervious even to the most powerful man’s attempts to do violence to it, Macbeth, by his futile yet determined will to tyrannize it, obscures its true nature in his own mind, leaving himself desolately cut off from the world of meaning and goodness that is actually there.
This chapter began with the question: why should contemporary political scientists pay serious attention to Shakespeare’s Macbeth? We found the initial answer to this question in the play’s exploration of a political phenomenon of enduring importance that is nevertheless often neglected by contemporary political science: tyranny. Macbeth’s tyranny, however, finally turns out to be like, but at the same time something more than, the tyranny that was diagnosed by the classical pioneers of political science, for whom even contemporary political scientists maintain some residual respect. By the end of this account of Macbeth, therefore, our opening question seems to be even more in need of an answer than it was at the beginning. Contemporary political scientists, after all, believe in witches and demons even less than they believe in tyranny. We are then led to ask whether such a depiction of demonic evil can possibly be of interest to a contemporary political science that is overwhelmingly secular in its assumptions. I think that it can. For whether or not one believes in demons, the ancient and popular belief in such malicious beings, and in their ability to influence human affairs, can be understood as a reflection of something very real indeed: the mysterious human capacity for irrational and self-destructive evil. The greatest dramatist of the human condition evidently believed at least this much, and thought the lesson worthy of his art.
1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press, 1991) 130.
2. Parenthetical references are to the Arden Shakespeare edition of Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997).
3. Aristotle, Politics 1279a25–1279b10.
4. On this point compare Xenophon’s Hiero, in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, eds. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (The Free Press, 1991) 12. Also consider Aristotle, Pol. 1311a15–20.
5. See Muir 1997, 36, note on lines 1–28.
6. Saint Augustine, The City of God, tr. Marcus Dods (The Modern Library, 1993) 171–72.
7. Compare the similar complaints of Xenophon’s Hiero: Strauss 1991, 5, 7.
8. Consider the contention in Xenophon’s Hiero that the evils of tyranny are hidden in the soul of the tyrant (Strauss 1991, 8), as well as Plato’s famous account of the misery of the tyrant in Book X of the Republic.
9. Alain Besançon, A Century of Horrors, trs. Ralph Hancock and Nathaniel Hancock (ISI Press, 2007) 55.
10. Consider Henry VI, Part 3 (II.ii).
11. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, tr. Leo Paul S. de Alvarez (Waveland Press, 1978) 12.
12. Alvarez 1978, 93–94.
13. Alvarez 1978, 54–55.