Chapter 6

Macbeth

Macbeth as villain has some superficial resemblances to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in his ruthless pursuit of the crown, but Macbeth has none of the jocularity and histrionic quality that Richard inherits from the Vice figure of the morality plays. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most developed experiment in the protagonist as villain-hero.1 Shylock and Claudius are sympathetic in individual speeches and soliloquies, but Macbeth seems to be sympathetic throughout the play because he is so acutely aware of the horror of his crimes. His conscience always bothers him, even at the very end of the play when he is fallen into a deep despair.2

He begins the play as a military hero, who has conquered the “merciless Macdonwald” (l.2.9) and “unseamed him from the nave [navel] to th’ chops [jaws]” (22). The “bleeding Captain” reports on the battle to the King, who is impressed with the heroic exploits of Macbeth and Banquo. They appear in the second scene with the Witches (I,iii). In the context of the first and third scenes, with thunder and lightning and foul weather, we know that something portentous is about to happen. Macbeth’s first line is: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.38), and we are plunged into moral ambiguity. His next line is to question the Witches: “Speak, if you can: what are you?” (47). The questions continue in his next speech. He is aware that the Witches are “imperfect speakers” (70) who convey “strange intelligence” (76). They are not yet the “juggling fiends.…/That palter with us in a double sense” (5.8.19–20) that they become at the end of the play. Of course, they answer none of Macbeth’s questions and vanish suddenly at line 78.

Banquo is more skeptical about the Witches than Macbeth: “The earth hath bubbles as the water has,/And these are of them” (79–80). He even thinks they may be an illusion:

Or have we eaten on the insane root

That takes the reason prisoner? (84–85)

But when Ross, on a mission from the King, calls Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth is astounded: “The Thane of Cawdor lives: why do you dress me/In borrowed robes?” (108–9). Thus begins the teasing ambiguity of the Witches.

Macbeth is suitably impressed, and he says to Banquo:

Do you not hope your children shall be kings,

When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me

Promised no less to them? (118–20)

Banquo, however, is wary:

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray ‘s

In deepest consequence. (123–26)

But Macbeth cannot be shaken out of his optimism; as he says, aside, to Banquo:

Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme. (127–29)

Notice that he is already speaking of “the imperial theme,” as if this were the necessary third step in what the Witches have promised. Macbeth is sufficiently aware that what the Witches speak is riddling: “This supernatural soliciting/Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (130–31). Most importantly, he already understands that if he follows through what they prophesy, he will have to murder the King:

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature? (134–37)

Shakespeare’s villains are not generally troubled by horrid images that cause a strong physiological reaction.

It is Macbeth’s acute awareness of his mental state that separates him from other Shakespearean villains:

Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical [imaginary],

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not. (137–42)

Again, we have that key word “horrible,” which matches “horrid” in line 135. Macbeth already imagines himself as a murderer and foresees the effects, both physiological and psychological, it will have on him.

Banquo precisely describes Macbeth’s psychological condition: “Look, how our partner’s rapt” (142). This is the same word he used before in addressing the Witches:

My noble partner

You greet with present grace and great prediction

Of noble having and of royal hope,

That he seems rapt withal. . . . (54–57)

“Rapt” is also Macbeth’s word in his letter to his wife: he “stood rapt in the wonder” (1.5.6) at the Witches’ recital. The word is not frequent in Shakespeare, but it occurs more often in this play than in any other. It is connected with “rapture,” and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it (in its third meaning) as: “Transported with some emotion, ravished, enraptured.”

So Macbeth is profoundly affected by what the Witches tell him. In an aside to Banquo, he leaves open the possibility that he may not have to do anything at all to bring on his good fortune: “If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me,/Without my stir” (143–44). But we know from his aside in the next scene (I,iv) that he is preparing himself to murder the King:

The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step

On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,

For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires:

The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (48–53)

Macbeth sounds like Richard, Duke of Gloucester, here, but there is no sense of the necessary murders as sport or game. I have focused on these early scenes because they make clear that Macbeth doesn’t need his wife’s forceful persuasions to convince him to murder the King; he is already preoccupied with this idea when he returns to Inverness castle in Act I, scene v.

Before the murder of King Duncan, Macbeth has a whole series of conscience-stricken soliloquies. He understands only too clearly the moral fault of what he is about to do and its dire consequences. His continuous awareness makes him different from other villains in Shakespeare. Act I, scene vii begins with a long soliloquy in which Macbeth ponders the moral implications of the murder he is just on the point of committing. It cannot be done quickly and successfully without thoughts of what will happen in “the life to come” (7). This is like the distinction Claudius makes in his soliloquy between what is true “In the corrupted currents of this world” as distinguished from what is true in heaven: “But ’tis not so above./There is no shuffling” (Hamlet 3.3.57, 60–61). So Macbeth realizes that

We still [always] have judgment here; that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague th’ inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends th’ ingredients of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips. (1.7.8–12)

Remember that Claudius is forced to drink from his own poisoned chalice in the last scene of Hamlet.

Macbeth’s powerful sense of his own tragedy is impressive in this soliloquy and in the many soliloquies that follow. He knows that Duncan is a guest in his castle

in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. (12–16)

This is like the violation of hospitality that Gloucester accuses Regan and Goneril of in King Lear. Macbeth is acutely self-judged:

I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

And falls on th’ other—(25–28)

The images are from horsemanship, when the rider vaults over the saddle and comes out on the other side. But Macbeth’s understanding of what is happening to him does not prevent him from murdering King Duncan; they only make it more agonizing and painful.

Macbeth’s long soliloquy in Act II, scene i, “Is this a dagger which I see before me” (33), still precedes the murder of the King, which does not occur until the next scene. Macbeth seems to be speaking of an imaginary dagger, “A dagger of the mind” (38), which he sees “in form as palpable” (40) as the dagger “which now I draw” (41). This real dagger is the one with which Macbeth will kill the King:

Thou marshal’st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use. (42–43)

By the feverish workings of his imagination, he already pictures the dagger, proleptically, covered with blood, as if he has already committed the murder:

I see thee still;

And on thy blade and dudgeon [wooden hilt] gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. (45–47)

So the dagger is both an illusion and graphically real.

It is interesting that Macbeth personifies “withered murder” (52):

thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost. (54–56)

Tarquin, in The Rape of Lucrece, was one of Shakespeare’s first villains. Macbeth moves toward his victim like the personified Murder, and, again, he personifies the “firm-set earth” (56), asking it not to hear his steps, “which way they walk, for fear/Thy very stones prate of my whereabout” (57–58) and give him away. It is all very dream-like, with Macbeth personifying Murder and Earth, and picturing himself moving inevitably to his tragic doom.

When the deed is done in Act II, scene ii, Macbeth’s main concern seems to be that he cannot answer the “God bless us” and “Amen” that Duncan’s servants pronounce in their sleep. It is as if he is already experiencing the effects of the murder, which separates him from God’s grace and begins the sense of despair he feels from this point on:

But wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen”?

I had most need of blessing, and “Amen”

Stuck in my throat. (29–31)

This sense of having lost God’s benediction makes Macbeth unique among Shakespeare’s villains. Why would he expect God’s “blessing” when he is in the very act of murdering the King? No doubt he has “most need of blessing” at this moment, yet it is clearly impossible.

Among Macbeth’s hallucinations is the voice he hears crying

“Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave [silk filament] of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast—(34–39)

It is curious how much Macbeth is given to personifications in his fearful discourse—in this speech, both Sleep and Care—a characteristic of Shakespeare’s earlier writing, as in The Rape of Lucrece.

Macbeth is preoccupied with sleep (and related words); the 32 uses are more than in any other play of Shakespeare. Insomnia is uniquely the effect of murder and tragedy in this play. The protagonist cannot let go of the frightening anticipation of sleeplessness that accompanies guilt:

Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house:

“Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more.” (40–42)

Macbeth’s fears echo those of the guilt-ridden King Henry IV, whose long apostrophe to sleep ends with a careworn conclusion: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (2 Henry IV 3.1.31).

After the murder of King Duncan, Macbeth continues on to other murders that are necessitated by the first murder: “To be thus is nothing, but [except] to be safely thus” (3.l.48). Banquo (and his son Fleance) are next because of what the Witches have promised Banquo, that he will be “father to a line of kings” (60). In a long soliloquy, Macbeth tries to engage with the Witches’ promises to Banquo:

There is none but he

Whose being I do fear: and under him

My genius is rebuked, as it is said

Mark Antony’s was by Caesar. (54–57)

This looks forward to events in Antony and Cleopatra. Macbeth, with the murderers he has hired, sounds a lot like Richard, Duke of Gloucester here. We note a steady deterioration in his sensitivity until he reaches the utter despair of Act V, scene v.

But he is already well on the way in the next scene (III,ii), as he tells his wife of his profound uneasiness and sense of futility:

We have scorched [slashed] the snake, not killed it:

She’ll close [heal] and be herself, whilst our poor malice

Remains in danger of her former tooth. (13–15)

Notice that he now speaks of the murder of King Duncan as “our poor malice,” a seemingly trivial and ill-intentioned affair. Macbeth describes vividly his and his wife’s physical and spiritual state:

these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy. (18–22)

“Ecstasy” is Shakespeare’s usual word for madness or mental and emotional frenzy.

But Banquo and Fleance are “assailable” (39), and Macbeth seeks to undo the fateful pronouncements of the Witches (the Weïrd Sisters, who function like the Fates). At the end of the scene, he conceals from his wife his intention to kill Banquo and Fleance: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,/ Till thou applaud the deed” (45–46). “Chuck,” or chick, is a familiar term of endearment, but it is interesting that Macbeth doesn’t confide in his wife at this point. The murders that he plans have a new urgency that seems to involve all of nature:

Come, seeling [that closes the eyes] night,

Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,

And with thy bloody and invisible hand

Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

Which keeps me pale! (46–50)

“That great bond” is a legal term that defines Macbeth’s essential humanity.

The scene ends with an apocalyptic metaphor:

Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse. (50–53)

The crow (also called the rook) is a bird that feeds on carrion.

It is curious how many birds of prey are mentioned in this play; they serve as “night’s black agents.” (We are reminded of Hitchcock’s baleful movie The Birds of 1963). In addition to the crow and the rook, we have also the raven, which is “hoarse/ That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan” (1.5.39–40). In Act II, scene ii, there is “the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman/ Which gives the stern’st good-night” (3–4) and afterwards screams (15). In Act II, scene iii, the owl is “the obscure bird,” which, as a portent, “Clamored the livelong night” (61–62). Also among the portents is:

A falcon, tow’ring in her pride of place,

Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed. (2.4.12–13)

These strange events signal perturbations in nature, since an owl’s ordinary diet is mice. We also have kites (3.4.74, carnivorous birds in the raven family), vultures (4.3.74), and loons (5.3.11). In addition, there are Hecate’s ministers, the bat who wings “His cloistered flight” (3.2.41) and “The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums” (42), which rings “night’s yawning peal” (43). All these flying things associated with black night are rapacious and portend something diabolical, like the murders with which they are linked.

When the Ghost of the murdered Banquo appears at Macbeth’s feast and sits in his place, Macbeth takes this as an evil portent, according to the proverbial “Murder will out” (Tilley M1315):

It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood.

Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;

Augures [auguries] and understood relations have

By maggot-pies [magpies] and choughs [a bird in the crow family] and rooks

brought forth

The secretist man of blood. (3.4.123–27)

Notice how powerful the birds are—and augury is a form of divination by the flight of birds—as signifiers of secret murder. All of nature is conspiring to avenge the deaths of Banquo and King Duncan, and to reveal even the most concealed man of blood.

We now move to Macduff, who has absented himself from Macbeth’s great feast. His murder is the next in a seemingly endless succession that Macbeth must accomplish in order to secure his initial murder—and to be able to sleep again. Once more, he doesn’t confide in his wife, but speaks with a new weariness of spirit:

I am in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (3.4.137–39)

This is a frightening image of the river of blood, a nightmarish image, with the curious word “tedious” to mark Macbeth’s growing apathy.

It is like Richard III’s image for his constrained and endless commitment to murder. He sees that he must now be married to his brother Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth, but he proceeds with a singular lack of enthusiasm:

Murder her brothers and then marry her!

Uncertain way of gain! But I am in

So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.

Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye. (Richard III 4.2.61–64)

It is as if Richard, like Macbeth, is caught up in a cycle of continuous murder that proceeds outside of his conscious will. This is a proverbial idea: “Crimes (Mischiefs) are made secure by greater crimes (mischiefs)” (Tilley C826). The sentiment probably originates in Seneca’s Agamemnon.3

Macduff is absent from his castle, but the murder of his wife and children in Act IV, scene ii, is a spectacle of unimaginable cruelty, like the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear (III, vii). It is performed by nameless murderers, like the killing of Banquo, and not by Macbeth himself (who kills King Duncan). Macduff underscores the savagery; it is because Macbeth

has no children. All my pretty ones?

Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam

At one fell swoop? (4.3.216–19)

Macduff cannot believe what he hears, and there is a certain nostalgia in his grief: “I cannot but remember such things were,/That were most precious to me” (222–23). Notice, too, the bird of prey image for Macbeth the murderer: “O hell-kite.”

By Act V, Macbeth is falling into despair, indicted by his remarkable insight into his spiritual condition:

I have lived long enough. My way of life

Is fall’n into the sear [withered], the yellow leaf,

And that which should accompany old age,

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. (5.3.22–28)

This echoes the imagery of Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold.” Macbeth’s sensitivity of the earlier scenes centering on the murder of King Duncan has disappeared. He is now apathetic and isolated, without friends, and feeling only the hollowness of the purely ceremonial “mouth-honor.”

He is acutely aware of his desiccation of spirit. When he hears the “cry within of women” (5.5.7 s.d.), announcing the death of his wife, Macbeth comments on his own apathy, very different from his earlier fears and imaginings:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been, my senses would have cooled

To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in ‘t. I have supped full with horrors.

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start [startle] me. (9–15)

We are made to feel that Macbeth’s sensibility has been dulled during the course of the play, that a great deal of time has passed, and that he is now an old man waiting to die.

That is why he seems to be wearily indifferent to his wife’s death:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word. (17–18)

Presumably, this is not a proper time for Lady Macbeth to die, now that her unfeeling husband cannot properly mourn her—perhaps it will be better “hereafter.” Or it could mean that she has died at an unpropitious time for Macbeth and for the state. Macbeth’s ambiguous words should be interpreted in terms of the despairing speech that follows:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. (19–23)

This is a speech about the endlessness and meaningless of time. The last syllable of recorded time does not lead to the Day of Judgment, as we would expect, but only to an empty void. It is the lack of any significance that is the marker of Macbeth’s deep depression. He despairs in the theological sense of a lack of belief in the possibility of God’s grace and beneficence. Like a number of Shakespeare’s villains, he is at this point technically an atheist, and now ready for death.

That is the presumed meaning of the end of the speech:

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. (23–28)

It is interesting that Shakespeare should choose to express Macbeth’s despair in acting imagery, which offers an excellent way of distinguishing between appearance and reality. The “poor” player is not necessarily a bad actor, but someone who illustrates the shortness and noisy fury of a life without significance. Macbeth, the conscience-stricken murderer, is commenting on his own life. The murders he has committed were all for naught because his ambition did not bring him either content or security, represented by the inability to sleep. His life has been full of perturbation, ending now in complete emptiness.

Lady Macbeth is not a villain in her own right,4 but we need to think of her as the enabling factor in the murder of the King. It is clear that Macbeth is seriously contemplating this murder well before Act I, scene v, where we see his wife reading his letter about his encounter with the Witches. What is remarkable about Lady Macbeth’s long soliloquy in this scene is her uncanny insight into the mind of her husband. She fears that his compassionate temperament will prevent him from committing murder. His nature

is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,

Art not without ambition, but without

The illness [evil] should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,

That wouldst thou holily; wouldst 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. (18–26)

Presumably, Lady Macbeth has none of these sentimental reservations, so that it is important that she “pour” her “spirits” into her husband’s ear (27). She doesn’t need to convince him of the necessity for the murder, but only to spur him on.

In another soliloquy before Macbeth arrives—and it is significant how important soliloquies are in this play for both protagonists—she already considers the entrance of Duncan into her castle as “fatal” (1.5.40). She calls upon spirits, presumably diabolic spirits, “That tend on mortal [murderous] thoughts” (42), to effect radical gender changes:

unsex me here,

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse [compassion],

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell [deadly] purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’ effect and it! (42–48)

I take “unsex” to mean that the spirits she invokes should remove all kind and milky feminine traits and make her a female warrior or Amazon, like Volumnia in Coriolanus. She prays that her blood, which carries human emotions, be made “thick” and unfeeling.

This long passage about unsexing initiates the gender debate that is so important in the play. On one side, Macbeth needs to prove his manliness, as defined in the second scene of the play, where the “brave Macbeth” (1.2.16), the consummate warrior, unseams the “merciless Macdonwald” (9) “from the nave to th’ chops” (22). It is interesting that the murderers Macbeth hires to kill Banquo and Fleance make a point of asserting their manliness (and therefore their fitness for murder). The First Murderer says: “We are men, my liege” (3.1.91). Macbeth then goes into a long discourse about various kinds of dogs, which he then applies to the Murderers:

and so of men.

Now if you have a station in the file,

Not i’ th’ worst rank of manhood, say ‘t. . . . (101–3)

The distinction is most tersely put in King Lear, when Edmund sends a Captain to murder Lear and Cordelia in prison. The Officer boasts of his manliness:

I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats.

If it be man’s work, I’ll do’t. (5.3.39–40)

So the unsexing of Lady Macbeth is to make her fit to do man’s work, in other words, to commit murder.

In Act I, scene vii she is completely unsympathetic to Macbeth’s scruples and hesitations:

Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valor

As thou art in desire? (39–41)

Macbeth protests his valor: “I dare do all that may become a man;/ Who dares do more is none” (46–47), but these rhetorical assertions don’t satisfy his wife:

What beast was ‘t then

That made you break this enterprise to me?

When you durst do it, then you were a man;

And to be more than what you were, you would

Be so much more the man. (47–51)

Lady Macbeth makes it clear that the only way her husband can prove his manhood is by killing the King.

She goes on, with extraordinary savagery, to reject her maternal role:

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 plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this. (54–59)

This glorification of infanticide as a proof of her manliness shocks Macbeth—and perhaps also arouses a certain admiration:

Bring forth men-children only;

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males. (72–74)

Lady Macbeth’s assertions of infanticide are a measure of her warrior-like valor, and they continue her earlier appeal about unsexing. She is specific about the rejection of maternal images, especially that of the nursing mother, as she invokes her diabolic spirits:

Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless [invisible] substances

You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry “Hold, hold!” (48–55)

Of course, we never see Lady Macbeth’s “keen knife,” nor does she participate directly in the murder of King Duncan, but we understand vividly her homicidal impulses. In a curious detail, she explains her non-participation: “Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done ‘t” (2.2.12–13). This is a frightening piece of information that we remember in Lady Macbeth’s mad scene (V, i).

There is one further scene in which Lady Macbeth insistently questions her husband’s manliness, when the Ghost of Banquo appears “and sits in Macbeth’s place” (3.4.38 s.d.). Macbeth is appalled: “Never shake/Thy gory locks at me” (51–52), but his wife tries to maintain the decorum of a festive dinner. She says to him, aside, with emphatic disgust: “Are you a man?” (59). He replies with alacrity: “Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that/Which might appall the devil” (60–61). But Lady Macbeth scoffs at her husband’s fears and imaginings:

O proper stuff!

This is the very painting of your fear.

This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,

Led you to Duncan. (61–64)

In the phrase “proper stuff” we see the authentic, domestic, hen-pecking wife, who has only contempt for her husband’s supposed sensitivity:

O, these flaws [gusts] and starts,

Impostors to true fear, would well become

A woman’s story at a winter’s fire,

Authorized [sanctioned] by her grandam. Shame itself!

Why do you make such faces? When all’s done,

You look but on a stool. (64–69)

In the mix-up of genders, Macbeth now shows himself to be womanish compared to his wife’s hearty masculinity. He is “unmanned in folly” (74), just as earlier Lady Macbeth invoked spirits to unsex her.

Macbeth’s protests are futile. When the Ghost of Banquo appears again, he once more asserts his manliness:

What man dare, I dare.

Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,

The armed rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger;

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble. (100–4)

But the Ghost will not be dictated to. It is only when it disappears that Macbeth can declare: “I am a man again” (109). None of this satisfies Lady Macbeth, and the scene ends with Macbeth’s plan to murder Macduff and his household, seemingly as a way to reassert his manliness and convince his wife (although he doesn’t tell her about it).

Lady Macbeth is developed very differently from her husband. She has none of his fears and sensitivities. For example, when we first hear the knocking at the gates of the castle, Macbeth is appalled by the noise, which reminds him of his bloody guilt:

What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes!

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine [redden],

Making the green one red. (2.2.58–62)

Macbeth examines his bloody hands in a powerful stage gesture.

When Lady Macbeth enters, she immediately agrees that her “hands are of your color, but I shame/ To wear a heart so white [cowardly]” (63–64). She then makes an observation which utterly separates her from her husband: “A little water clears us of this deed;/How easy is it then!” (66–67). Macbeth thinks rather that his bloody hands will redden the infinitely large, “multitudinous seas.”

All of this imagery returns in Lady Macbeth’s mad scene (V, i). It is night and she enters sleep-walking “with a taper” (20 s.d.). The words she speaks seem to undo what she has said earlier in the play. She is preoccupied with the blood of murder, and she rubs her hands obsessively to wash them clean. She takes up lines that appeared earlier in a different context:

Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One: two: why, then ’tis time to do ‘t.

Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear

who knows it, when none can call our pow’r to accompt? Yet who would have

thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? (38–43)

Lady Macbeth’s madness conveys the feeling that she has participated more directly in the murder of King Duncan than what we have seen. She has intimations of hell and damnation.

She also remembers the murder of Macduff’s wife, which Macbeth hesitated even to tell her about: “The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now? What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” (45–46). She speaks in sing-song rhymes like the mad Ophelia (Hamlet IV, v). Although she washes her hands compulsively, we know that it is all a meaningless ritual. The gesture is a powerful reenactment of her guilt: “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!” (53–55). These lines seem to be remembered in King Lear when the blind Gloucester says to Lear: “O, let me kiss that hand!” and the mad King says only: “Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality” (4.6.128–29). Again, there is a specific answer here to Macbeth that extends the scene of Banquo’s Ghost (III, iv): “Wash your hands; put on your nightgown; look not so pale! I tell you again, Banquo’s buried. He cannot come out on ‘s grave” (65–67).

Finally, Lady Macbeth’s speech picks up bits and pieces from the whole play: “To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand! What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!” (69–72). The repetition of “to bed” reminds us of how closely sleeplessness is linked with Lady Macbeth’s sense of overpowering guilt—and Macbeth’s too—which is only now beginning to manifest itself. Lady Macbeth is not a villain, but she has murderous and savage thoughts that are like her husband’s. She helps to define Macbeth’s role as a villain-hero, although, until her mad scene, she has none of his compunctions about killing. The soliloquy in her mad scene would be more appropriate to Macbeth if he were not so drowned in despair and spiritual aridity.

Macbeth has a special status in Shakespeare as a villain-hero. In other words, even while he is engaged in the murders of Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children, he feels tremendous guilt and agonizes with himself over his ill-doing. We feel sympathetic to Macbeth in his soul-searching and in his spiritual crisis, as we do to Claudius when he examines his conscience in his long soliloquy in Hamlet (III, iii). Macbeth’s (and Lady Macbeth’s too) guilty conscience is expressed by the inability to sleep. Macbeth is also troubled by the imagery of birds of prey. The play raises significant gender issues, especially in what it means to be a man. Lady Macbeth unsexes herself to become a female warrior, and she accuses her husband of a lack of manliness in the encounter with Banquo’s ghost. Lady Macbeth’s role in the play serves to develop our understanding of her husband. She doesn’t persuade him to murder Duncan, but she has acute understanding of his thinking, that he “wouldst not play false,/And yet wouldst wrongly win” (1.5.22–23). At the end of the play, she moves sharply away from her facile comment, “A little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.66) to the passionate guilt of her mad speeches, whereas her extremely sensitive husband moves in the opposite direction to despair and spiritual desiccation.

Notes

1. See the original observations of E. A. J. Honigmann on “Macbeth: The Murderer as Victim,” which is Chapter 8 of Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response, 2 ed., London, 2002. Honigmann also speaks insightfully about Iago in Chapter 6: “Secret Motives in Othello.”

2. See Kenneth Muir, “Image and Symbol in ‘Macbeth,’” Shakespeare Survey, 19 (1966), 45–54.

3. See the note in the Arden edition of King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond, London, 1981, p. 268.

4. Bradley makes a point of the “literalism” (p. 372) of Lady Macbeth’s mind: “But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,—in her comparative dullness of imagination” (p. 371). A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1950. First published 1904.