MacBeth – William Shakespeare, c. 1606 ★★★★★

Something Wicked This Way Comes

One remarkable thing about MacBeth is that there is no one here to like. No one.

The protagonists are thorough evil, showing only the slightest, most self-serving pangs of conscience as they conduct their villainy. Those arrayed against them are likewise shifty characters.

If you are looking for something to warm up to, buy a dog. You won’t find it here.

Yet MacBeth makes this all pretty palatable. For one thing, it plays as a kind of phantasmagoria of witchcraft and strange weather. There’s also an exotic quality to the tragedy. Shakespeare’s only Scottish play makes use of the country’s fabled blasted heaths and ruins to cultivate an effect you wouldn’t associate with anywhere else on earth. MacBeth is unique in the Shakespeare canon, and thank God. He’d make bleak reading otherwise.

Finally, there’s the language, pungent yet lyrical, fueled by thoughts pushing outside the ken of men, contained by a thin sobriety of reason that is beautiful in its control.

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. 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. [Act V, scene v, lines 19-28]

The plot of MacBeth is part of its malevolent charm. We meet MacBeth in an already bloodied state. The Thane of Glamis, he enters fresh from the vanguard of battle after slitting open a rebel lord “from the nave to the chops.” He meets three witchy women practicing black magic who tell him he will someday be Scotland’s king. This idea grows on him, and he shares it with his wife. That’s a mistake, as Lady MacBeth’s appetite for power dwarves her husband’s. If you’re any kind of man, she tells him, you’ll turn your lord and master into a pincushion forthwith. Rebels are one thing, a determined wife quite another; a cowed MacBeth resolves to go along.

As the black-magic women put it at the beginning: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair:/Hover through the fog and filthy air.” [I.i.11-12]

MacBeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy; scholars say it would be shorter still except for the introduction by another hand of an evil spirit, Hecate, who appears twice to prod on the witches, or Weird Sisters as they are called in the play. Scenes are fairly short; soliloquies seldom run more than a dozen lines. A popular theory is that what we have here is not what Shakespeare wrote, but a condensed version taken from a prompt book, or an actor’s imperfect memory.

Never mind. It’s quite possible that a longer, fleshed-out MacBeth would outstay its welcome for many who eagerly read and re-read the version we have today. This play zips along briskly, packed with enough murderous action and skullduggery to charge the heart of the most jaded boy and keep one reading no matter how much rhyme and iambic pentameter lie in the way.

The language of MacBeth is uniquely sticky; perhaps because the play is such an ambiguous tone poem of cosmic indifference and divine punishment it became a springboard for some of Shakespeare’s most memorable phrases, all of which carry a darkish hue: “Screw your courage to the sticking place,” “Double, double, toil and trouble,” “Blood will have blood,” “Out, damned spot,” “What’s done cannot be undone.”

There’s one bit of comic relief in the entire play, the infamous Porter’s scene, which comes right at the same time MacBeth is killing his king, in Act II, scene iii. Opening the door of MacBeth’s castle for two thanes, MacDuff and Lennox, the Porter explains how drink serves as both fuel and extinguisher of lust:

Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes 
the desire, but it takes away the performance. There- 

fore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator 
with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him   
on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and dis- 
heartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in 

conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him 
the lie, leaves him. [II.iii.29-36]

In performances I’ve seen of MacBeth, the actor playing the Porter sometimes gives this bit all he can; even offering a Rocky-Horror-esque pelvic thrust when he gets to the part about “stand to.” It’s excessive, but you see the impulse in a play as dark as MacBeth to give the only funny scene every chance of getting a laugh, even a dumb one.

There is a humor in the rest of MacBeth, albeit not of a ha-ha kind. One point that has been made about the play is how warped it is in terms of the protagonist’s fatal flaw. Clearly that would be “ambition,” yet it’s a callow kind of ambition that requires the active ministry of his wife to unleash. Alone, MacBeth isn’t exactly supercharged with visions of getting ahead. “If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me without my stir,” [I.iv.157-59] he ponders after the witches’ first prophesy, that he will become the Thane of Cawdor, is proved correct.

Lady MacBeth’s attitude is more forceful. When she reads MacBeth’s account of the witches, never mind it isn’t something she witnessed firsthand, she is provoked to make a vow so unhinged it is almost a parody of Elizabethan tragedy.

Come, you spirits 
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, 

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full 
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; 
Stop up the access and passage to remorse, 
That no compunctious visitings of nature 
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between 
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, 
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, 
Wherever in your sightless 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!" [I.v.41-54]

If that isn’t enough, she even fantasizes a bit later about plucking a nursing babe from her nipple and dashing its skull upon the floor, for shame of it having a father too weak to kill a guest for her pleasure. Yet not very long after, she is a meek spectator driven to madness by the extent of her husband’s depravity.

Lady MacBeth is embarrassed at her husband's failure to hide the evidence, in this sketch by the noted English artist Henry Fuseli first exhibited in 1812. Fuseli painted many such scenes from MacBeth. [Image from www.tate.org.uk.] 

MacBeth by this time is pretty far gone, reduced to killing the wife and child of a suspected foe and driven to distraction by the supposed sight of another blood-drenched victim visiting him at a party. But moderation is not in the cards for him, any more than it was for Hitler in his Führerbunker. “I am in blood/Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er.” [III.iv.135-37] Not only has ambition made him miserable, it makes him a miserable leader, falling back on the false comfort of those prophesies as he turns his kingdom into a ruin, mocking the few “whey-faced” toadies he has left after everyone with brains has deserted his besieged stronghold at Dunsinane.

He looks like a thoroughly awful man, but as I said at the beginning, no one manages to look good in this play. MacDuff is this play’s instrument of vengeance, but he also abandons his wife and child to their fate. Banquo’s ambitions are stirred by the same prophesies that fuel MacBeth’s crimes, and while he doesn’t slay anyone over them (he was reputedly the ancestor of James I, Great Britain’s reigning monarch when the play was first performed, and Shakespeare is careful about this), he does seem beguiled plenty by ambitious thoughts. Duncan, the king, is pretty much admired by everyone, even his killer MacBeth, but he’s a surprisingly passive figure who seems too foolish to live so high. Duncan’s son, Malcolm, tells MacDuff he is a greedy, lustful monster, then claims he is just kidding, hardly reassuring in a play like this.

Even the minor characters are suspect. A nurse might be called the play’s only decent female character, yet when she gains knowledge of her mistress Lady MacBeth’s fell deeds she stops her ears against it. So too does a doctor, who later escapes Dunsinane and leaves his patient, Lady M, to off herself offstage.

Then there’s Ross, the voice of the Scottish nobility as it first follows, then rejects, MacBeth as their leader. When I first read the play in high school, I thought: “Here’s one character it’s safe to like.” Then our English teacher screened the Roman Polanski film adaptation from 1971, which features Ross as a kind of Machiavellian shape-shifter. Polanski does this by suggesting culpability in Ross’s non-speaking moments, and even giving Ross lines that aren’t his in the original play. However skewed, it has colored my perception of that particular thane ever since. He does do something in the play as written that’s pretty despicable, springing on MacDuff that his wife and child have been murdered after telling him all was “well” a minute or two before. Then again, MacDuff kind of deserves it for leaving them behind when he fled to England.

MacBeth leaves you with little to love except for the brilliance of Shakespeare in describing a thoroughly God-forsaken environment of petty, deadly whims. If there is any joy to be found, it is in the delightfully skewed genius of its author.