Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

What is a traitor?

In John Marston’s play The Malcontent (1603/4), the disguised and usurped Duke Altofronto asks Bilioso, a courtier, ‘What religion are you of now?’ The courtier replies, ‘Of the Duke’s religion, when I know what it is. What religion else?’ The incident brings into sharp focus religious uncertainties, the need for self-preservation, the professional hypocrisy of courtiers and their lack of integrity, all of which are indicative of the social anxieties prevalent in early Jacobean England.

Let us take, for example, the word ‘traitor’. By his control of the Church, Henry VIII allowed for a change of language to take place in which the words ‘heretic’ and ‘traitor’ became almost synonymous. The punishment, of course, might remain the same but traitor has a more secular, political force to it and is dependent on the government in power. It individualized the notion of treachery as an act directed against the monarch, but when the King was, as Henry VIII became, the head of the Church of England, the terms ‘heresy’ and ‘treachery’ were synonymous: to oppose the monarch was also to oppose the religious institution of which the monarch was the supreme head, and vice versa. It all depended, of course, on the religion of the reigning monarch. So while prominent Protestants were executed as ‘traitorous heretics’ under the Catholic Queen Mary, so under Elizabeth, who was excommunicated by the Pope, Catholics were regarded as traitors to the realm. Some of them then paid the price by being publicly ‘unseam’d…from the nave to th’ chops’ (Macbeth, 1.2.22) on the scaffold, just as the traitor Macdonwald is reported to have been killed by Macbeth on the battlefield.

Such hangings and evisceration continued with James, especially after the Gunpowder Plot (November 1605) was uncovered, in which Catholics had engaged in planning high treason in the attempt to kill the King and the whole of his government. As Catholics, the conspirators were ‘heretics’ but in their design to assassinate the King and his parliament they were also guilty of ‘treason’. But one of the linguistic devices that captured Catholics used to claim their innocence was to ‘equivocate’, and so another term, ‘equivocation’, acquired popular currency. Equivocation was a means of exploiting the instabilities of language in order to obscure the truth as defined by the State, and it was a favoured strategy of Jesuit dissidents.

The Old Testament commandment ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ is only ‘false witness’ if it distorts or flatly contradicts the ‘truth’. Equivocation suggests that the ‘truth’ is unstable, allowing for more than one interpretation. Macbeth takes this problem a stage further to ask the following question: Can those in power create a situation in which language itself is abused in order to reverse the normal meanings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’? To do so would be to invert the normal order of things.

‘What is a traitor?’ Lady Macduff’s son asks. ‘Why, one that swears and lies’ is the reply:

SON	And must they all be hang’d that swear and lie?
LADY MACDUFF	Every one.
SON	Who must hang them?
LADY MACDUFF	Why, the honest men.
SON	Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men, and hang up them.
	(4.2.46–7, 51–7)

The audience knows, of course, that in this case it is not Macduff who is the ‘traitor’, although he opposes the new king, Macbeth. At the end of the scene, the ‘Poor prattler’, as his mother calls him, is stabbed to death because he denies his father’s treachery; nonetheless, the First Murderer calls him ‘Young fry of treachery!’ (4.2.85). By this point in the play we are convinced that ‘fair’ has become ‘foul’ and ‘foul’ has become ‘fair’, thereby inverting normal moral categories.

Macbeth and interpretation

Macbeth was written in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot and the executions of Catholic ‘traitors’ and priests and at a time when the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ were being undermined.

‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth – likely in repertory with (Jonson’s) Volpone at the Globe shortly after the resumption of playing after Easter (1606) – managed to do something…profound, registering deeper tectonic shifts taking place in Jacobean England…By early 1606, the fear was all too real that once equivocation took root, “in short time there will be no faith, no troth, no trust”. One of Shakespeare’s most powerful insights in Macbeth is that in so infected a climate…the good, along with the evil, embrace equivocation.’

Shapiro, J. (2015: 228–9)

As we have seen throughout our journey, there is a relationship created in drama between the writer, the performers and the spectators, who are part of a conversation through the agency of the text in performance or in reading. The historical circumstances of the text’s inception need, therefore, to be considered if that conversation is to be meaningful, even though a modern interpretation will impose modern meanings upon it, from current cultural perspectives. Religion cannot be far away from the discussion of Macbeth, nor can the fact that a Scottish king had recently ascended the throne of England, and that a significant political change had taken place with the movement from the Tudor to the Stuart dynasty. At this period monarchical power, whether Tudor or Stuart, was absolute and thus invited flattery. It may be that Macbeth was intended to flatter the new king, although Shakespeare’s method, as we will see, seems to have been much more subtle than mere ‘flattery’ would suggest.

‘Reading’ Macbeth

How do we today read or interpret Macbeth? The play appears to question the reduction of ’history’ to single organic narratives such as ‘the Elizabethan world picture’. Some contemporary criticism has set out to challenge the readings of liberal humanist critics who start from the position of a singular established universal ‘truth’ that prevails through history. Thus Alan Sinfield, writing in 1992 on Macbeth (in Brown, R. D. and Johnson, D. (eds) [2000: 130, 136]), challenged prevailing orthodox interpretations. For example, he points to the fact that Macbeth, in killing the rebel Macdonwald, is hailed as a great warrior by King Duncan, who calls him a ‘valiant cousin’ and a ‘worthy gentleman’, but when Macbeth kills King Duncan he is subsequently seen as a murderer.

Sinfield writes, ‘Violence is good…when it is in the service of the prevailing dispositions of power; when it disrupts them, it is evil’, and he argues that ‘Macbeth focuses on major strategies by which the state asserted its claim at one conjuncture.’ Sinfield argues further that, although certainly portrayed as ‘a murderer and an oppressive ruler’, Macbeth is, in effect, ‘one version of the absolutist ruler, not the polar opposite’.

Readings such as Sinfield’s, in the context of changing ideologies, notions of historical accuracy or universal truth, prompt the modern critic to challenge and review what has been hitherto regarded as critical orthodoxy.

Macbeth in the past may sometimes have been seen as an easier play to study than the other three great tragedies, but today it foregrounds the complexities of interpretation by asking questions about the definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as determined by society, by politicians or by anyone who tries to limit meaning. The play itself shifts its perspectives, working through a series of equivocations. In 1986 the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton was providing a very different interpretation of the Weird Sisters than conventional readings allow:

‘The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare.’

Eagleton, T. (1986, 1987 p/b: 2), William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Later, Eagleton revised his view, arguing that the witches, in their negativity, display an abhorrence of the positivity of existence (Eagleton, T. [2010], On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press), but his subsequent reconsideration illustrates the divergence of views within critical perception, even at times with a single scholar’s reading of the plays.

The murder of a Scottish king as a central concern of the play can also be read in two ways. The first is in accordance with a traditional literary orthodoxy, which would see the regicide as a potentially subversive, dramatic event and a challenge to the philosophy of the ‘divine right of kings’ that James I was known to support. This was the philosophy to which Claudius had appealed in Hamlet when confronted by the rebellious Laertes: ‘There’s such divinity doth hedge a king/That treason can but peep to what it would,/Acts little of his will’ (Hamlet, 4.5.123–5). A second reading is more subversive, in itself questioning the methods of King Duncan, and would seek to determine whether within the claim to ‘divine right’ there lurked a force that the King’s own militaristic regime actually encourages. It would also question the focus of ‘evil’ in the play in female characters such as the Weird Sisters or Lady Macbeth.

Spotlight

The play here exposes equivocation. James I was a voyeur who used his power over his courtiers for his own vicarious sexual pleasure. Duncan is portrayed often as a holy man (as, for example, by Griffith Jones in the renowned 1976 RSC production), but another reading might suggest that he is the man who sends his thanes off to war while he looks on. Duncan says, ‘There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face’ (1.4.11–12) but this, too, is an equivocal statement: from one perspective it asserts that you can never know what another person is thinking from looking at their face, thus reaffirming the existence of the hypocrisy and deception which permeates the play. From another perspective it also suggests that there is no need of an ‘art’ to find out what a person is thinking because it will show in the speaker’s face.

Hell’s gate

In the spring of 1606 the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet was executed for his supposed complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. One of the ‘main crimes’ levelled at the Jesuits (members of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order of priests) was that of equivocation, of saying one thing to disguise something potentially more incriminating. Indeed, at his trial, Garnet had attempted to justify the practice. Shakespeare alludes to Garnet as one of those entering the hell’s gate of Macbeth’s castle in the Porter’s scene:

Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator.

(2.3.8–12)

But, as James Shapiro points out, the person knocking at the gate is Macduff, who in the eyes of the audience is far from being represented as a traitor and even in the Porter’s quipping the equivocator has done so ‘for God’s sake’, which makes his fate ambiguous.

At the end of the play Macbeth himself comes ‘To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth’ (5.5.43–4). Indeed, with the Weird Sisters’ chant ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ the normal referential properties of language are inverted so that meanings are the opposite of what we might expect. In this way, Macbeth encounters a Birnam Wood that is not Birnam Wood, and he finally dies at the hand of an adversary who was not, albeit only in a technical sense, ‘of woman born’.

Temptation and conscience

The myth of Adam and Eve’s sin is also not far away in this play. Macbeth is encouraged to undertake his treacherous murder by Lady Macbeth, who is charged with sexual power. What she says about ripping the suckling child from her breast and dashing its brains out (1.7.54–9), in her determination that her husband should secure power through murder, is a powerful image of the destruction of innocence. The crime of the mother killing her child is presented as being as ‘unnatural’ as the subject killing the monarch. Yet it goes beyond it, since monarchs lose their innocence but babies cannot. So maybe we have here a further reading of Lady Macbeth’s image in the overall narrative context of the play. This is the power of the Shakespearean text: the rich ambiguity of possibility (which is not to be confused with ‘equivocation’) at its heart, which invites a variety of responses.

Macbeth and the Weird Sisters

Macbeth is given a conscience, which emerges in the illusions he sees – the dagger before him (2.1.33f.) and the ghost of Banquo (3.4.44–73). Throughout the play there is a dark inevitability suggested about his curiosity in an underworld where he cannot tell whether the phantoms before him, the Weird Sisters, are male or female, and whether they speak the truth or not. Is what they say true or false? Ironically it is both, as they prove their credibility in pointing to the future to the very end. Because of their grotesque appearance, the strange rituals in which they engage and their gruesome pot of broth, the audience is exposed to a palpable form of evil but we should remember that Shakespeare creates them as symptoms and not the cause of the evil into which Macbeth descends.

All that the Weird Sisters predict actually happens but does what they say make it happen? To ask that question is to demonstrate that Shakespeare has drawn us into the play. We are uncertain in our response because of the ways in which the play unsettles the stability of language. It is the dramatist who makes the play happen; his dramatic characters are vehicles that carry the action forward to its conclusion. But we, the audience, ask such questions and respond accordingly. In the soliloquy at 1.3.127f. Macbeth balances probabilities against realities, imaginings against conclusions, with the equivocal tautology, ‘And nothing is, but what is not’ (142). In this way Macbeth draws attention to the process of equivocation as well as to the temptation that it seems to offer him. The Christian man is being drawn to heinous sin, to what in the world he desires, but along with the desire comes a consideration of its consequences – a ‘conscience’, in other words – that recognizes the sinfulness of the temptation even as Macbeth succumbs to its attractions. His is a more intense version of Claudius’s more perfunctory stirrings of conscience in Hamlet (3.4.36f.). Here Macbeth says:

…Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man,

That function is smother’d in surmise,

(Macbeth, 1.3.137–41)

Shakespeare has Macbeth say in the same speech that the ‘horrid image’ of the deed he imagines ‘doth unfix my hair’. The portrayal is of energy and an excitement for what, at this stage, is nothing more than a fantasy encapsulating a desire to do the almost unthinkable, by living what is imagined. It is a strange voyeurism of one’s own thoughts, a submission to what Christianity terms ‘temptation’. Dramatically, these temptations are spurred on by the embodiment of the Weird Sisters’ evil. Yet the consequences that occur are not postponed to the afterlife but follow immediately on from the deed itself, as surely as did the arrest and death, mostly by executions, of the Gunpowder plotters upon the ‘stage’ of the scaffold.

The soliloquy ‘Is this a dagger, which I see before me,…A dagger of the mind, a false creation,/Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?’ (2.1.33, 38–9) appears similarly to be the product of temptation, a pre-vision of the deed and its danger but also a luxuriating in it, an enjoyment of its process. These reflections are not specifically about right or wrong but about the process of a deed that in the context of the play is clearly being portrayed as wrong. Even Macbeth’s statement to his wife that ‘We will proceed no further in this business’ (1.7.31) can be interpreted as a request for further confirmation of the resolution to realize in action a dangerous fantasy.

‘Unsex me here’

Lady Macbeth’s invitation to the ‘Spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here’ (1.5.37–8), comes in the second part of her great soliloquy (1.5.14f.), which must rank as an example of Shakespeare’s darkest, most intense writing. In her determination to be ‘unsexed’, Lady Macbeth deploys a stringent sexual imagery that aligns, but in a sadomasochistic manner, sexual union with personal gratification. The negative wish invokes the positive enjoyment of the self-cursing: ‘make thick my blood,/Stop up th’access and passage to remorse’(42–3); ‘Come to my woman’s breasts,/And take my milk for gall’ (46–7), ‘Come, thick Night,/And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell’(49–50). This is a sexual union that comes close to an association with the darkness of death itself. At the end of the soliloquy Shakespeare depicts Lady Macbeth as changing sex, in crying that her phallic ‘keen knife see not the wound it makes,/Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,/To cry, “Hold, Hold!”’ (51–3). Here, under the ‘blanket’ of the night, as in a bed, is the sexual climax of the deed: the spirits that she invokes at the start of the passage all point to her enjoyment of the act. It is a speech of impressive sexual power exposing a disturbed imagination. Lady Macbeth has become one with the darkness that accompanies her desire, and it is a path that Macbeth himself will shortly follow.

Consequences

With the deed done, and with the hands of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth physically covered in blood (2.2.58f.), Shakespeare starts to move us from the world of temptation and diseased imagination into the world of consequences. Macbeth deludes himself, as Lady Macbeth has done, that he has the power to see ‘the future in the instant’ and that he can, therefore, control events. However, even though in the stages leading up to the regicide he is fully aware of the moral implications of the act, in the wake of the deed itself he becomes paranoid as the future begins to slip away from him. Believing in the accuracy of the Weird Sisters’ prediction that it is Banquo’s lineage that will succeed to the throne of Scotland, Macbeth muses that ‘To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus’ (3.1.47). To secure his own future he must kill Banquo but, no matter what he does, there is always something – in this case, Banquo’s son Fleance – that escapes his grasp.

‘In Macbeth, Shakespeare brings an audience to recognize the power of language and performance to create their own versions of reality, to manipulate and shape the ways we understand and respond to events. Outside the play, either as a private citizen or a head of state, Macbeth would be what Malcolm judges him: a butcher. But in it, for all the ways his evil is made clear and his poetry is undercut, he can still retain the sympathy of an audience even after his death. In the end, the play leaves audiences (and critics) trying to reconcile two contradictory impulses: the impulse to condemn Macbeth as evil and the impulse to mourn and celebrate his courage and perverse magnificence.’

Collins, M. J. (1989: 94–5), ‘Macbeth and Its Audience’ in Dotterer, R. (ed.) (1989), Shakespeare, Text, Subtext, and Content. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses

The fantastical imaginings of the aspiring protagonist and his ambitious spouse, once converted into actions, return to torment the perpetrators. The rich and vivid imagery of the play invites us to experience vicariously the act of murder: Macbeth hears a voice crying, ‘“Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murther Sleep,”’ (2.2.34–5), and later Lady Macbeth is seen sleepwalking, which is described by the Doctor as ‘A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching!’ (5.1.9–11). In washing her hands in her sleep, ‘Out, damned spot! out, I say!’ (5.1.36), she contradicts her statement following the murder, when she claimed ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (2.2.66). On the whole, the horrifying consequences of their deeds far exceed even the imaginations of the protagonist and his wife, to the point where, as Lady Macbeth laments, they have fulfilled their desire but unwittingly sacrificed their ‘content’: ‘Nought’s had, all’s spent,/Where our desire is got without content’ (3.2.4–5).

Macbeth’s earlier question, ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?’ (2.2.59–60), is answered through the process of the play in the negative. Textually, it might remind us of an opposing statement in Richard II, ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off from an anointed King;’ (3.2.54–5). In the same speech Richard draws a comparison between darkness and light, when the sun rises, ‘And darts his light through every guilty hole’, exposing ‘murthers, treasons, and detested sins’ (43–4), making his treacherous cousin Bolingbroke ‘tremble at his sin’ (3.2.53). To secure the crown, Macbeth has spilt the ‘sacred’ blood of an anointed king and will, like Claudius in Hamlet, assume the role of a ‘player king’ himself, when ‘invested’ at Scone.

Whether balm or blood, the realities appear to depend on political pragmatism. The guilt-ridden Macbeth is destroyed by political strategy – a union between Scotland and England, with Malcolm appealing to the English King for support (4.3.43–4) – and the nature of kingship in this union is articulated by means of the vocabulary of saintliness. Macduff refers to Malcolm’s father as ‘a most sainted King’ and the Queen as one who ‘Died every day she liv’d’ (4.3.109, 111). The King of England, Edward the Confessor, is endowed with divine power and he can solicit heaven to cure people of sickness: ‘sundry blessings hang about his throne,/That speak him full of grace’ (4.3.158–9). This utilizes the language of the traditional Catholic prayer to the Virgin Mary (‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’), but is here associated with the King who may have been watching the play, full of the hypocrisy of his own ‘holiness’.

Shakespeare may appear to be flattering King James, but at the same time he may also be teasing out some of the moral issues surrounding the power of monarchy that inform the play. We might wonder, for example, in Act 4, Scene 1, whether Macbeth’s words ‘Horrible sight’ elicited by the witches’ vision of one of Banquo’s successors carrying the ‘twin balls’ and ‘triple sceptres’ of the monarch of a united Scotland and England under James, elicited the same response in the King watching the play at a royal performance as it might have done in a possible ‘closet’ dissenter in the audience? The whole issue of the Union of England and Scotland was, historically, one in which James was being frustrated. Of course, images are received in different ways and words can be understood in different contexts by different people.

Signifying nothing

Equivocation, as we have seen, is established as a language for the play from its opening, when the Weird Sisters comment that ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.11). It sets the scene and paves the way for further prophecies, for Macbeth’s journey and arrival. It leads ultimately to that final recognition of the futility of his actions when he hears of the death of Lady Macbeth:

…Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(5.5.23–8)

Lady Macbeth has left the stage, the light of life has gone out like a burnt candle, and all is darkness. Without the natural rhythms of life and the institutions that are designed to support them, all life, including royalty, is without substance and devoid of meaning. Macbeth’s ‘nothing’, however, may go deeper, reflecting the variety of discourses that feed into the play’s demonstration of the consequences of equivocation. As Malcolm Evans points out, ‘The “nothing” signified is not merely an absence but a delirious plentitude of selves and meanings, always prior to, and in excess of, the self-naturalizing signs and subjects of the discourses it calls perpetually to account’ (1986: 117).

Key idea

In that ‘nothing’ we may find not only, therefore, the fate of the protagonist but also the enigma of the play’s progress. It both flatters and questions divine kingship and authority by placing a focus on events such as war, murder, executions, treachery and loyalty, and exposes in the process royal succession, the emerging instability of language and the equivocation that lies at the heart of both power and dissent.