Professor’s notes are in close accord with Boaden’s description of
her as “an exulting savage”--it only proves how potent a factor in
the art of the stage is the unconscious and inevitable intrusion
of the actor’s personality. For this creature of “turbulent and
inhuman strength of spirit” was not at all what Mrs. Siddons in her
critical moments conceived Lady Macbeth to be. Her recorded memoranda
exhibit a widely different interpretation, and contain, indeed, much
penetrating criticism on the general scope and purpose of the play.
Even the physical image of Lady Macbeth, as it presented itself to
her imagination, was strangely unlike the threatening and commanding
figure which she actually presented on the stage. She thought of her as
embodying a type of beauty “generally allowed to be most captivating
to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile”--a
description which calls from her biographer the almost indignant
protest that “the public would ill have exchanged such a representation
for the dark locks and eagle eyes of Mrs. Siddons.” But the most
remarkable feature of her criticism lies in its constant insistence
upon the essentially feminine nature of Lady Macbeth. Speaking of her
entrance in the Third Act, she pictures in a few eloquent words the
sudden change which the haunting memory of crime has already wrought
in her character. “The golden round of royalty now crowns her brow
and royal robes enfold her form, but the peace which passeth all
understanding is lost to her for ever, and the worm that never dies
already gnaws her heart.” And, again, still treating of this same
scene, the most deplorably pathetic in all tragedy, “she exhibits for
the first time striking indications of sensibility, nay, tenderness and
sympathy; and I think this conduct is nobly followed up by her during
the whole of their subsequent eventful intercourse.” Not less striking
is the keen perception which these notes exhibit of the terrible
anguish of the woman herself: “Her feminine nature, her delicate
structure, it is too evident, are soon overwhelmed by the enormous
pressure of her crimes.... She knows by her own woeful experience the
torments he undergoes, and endeavours to alleviate his sufferings.”
But there is one sentence in these notes more pregnant with meaning
than all the rest. “The different physical powers of the two sexes,”
she writes, “are finely delineated in the different effects which their
mutual crimes produce.” Here in a few words is to be found the key
that will unlock the heart of the tragedy. Not merely the different
physical powers, but also, and with even a deeper truth, the different
mental and moral characteristics of the two sexes in the presence of
crime, are here illustrated by Shakespeare with unsurpassable force
and delicacy. This is the imaginative theme which his transcendent
genius has fastened upon the legend of Macbeth, and there is scarcely a
line of the play which can be rightly understood until we realise that
the two central figures are, and are deliberately intended to be, the
embodiment and expression of the contrasted characteristics of sex.
To argue that Lady Macbeth is not truly and typically a woman, is to
destroy at one blow the delicate fabric which the poet has been at
such pains to construct: to strive to vindicate the character of her
husband at her expense, is but a vain endeavour to break through the
empire of crime which sways and dominates the lives of both. There is
here, indeed, no question of moral rescue for either; and it were idle
to debate what he or she might have been under different conditions.
For, as Shakespeare has conceived the action of the story, the shadow
of guilt hangs from the first like a murky cloud in the sky, and the
invisible hands of fate have drawn the net of evil closely around them
long ere they appear upon the scene. But, accepting these conditions,
with the transformation of individual character which they imply,
_Macbeth_ stands out among the works of Shakespeare as a sublime study
of sexual contrast, a superb embodiment of the force and the weakness
of the conjugal relation.
Coleridge has aptly observed that the dominant note of the tragedy
is struck in its opening lines. The appearance of the supernatural
agents of evil serves to set the framework of the picture: their choppy
fingers have already drawn the magic circle of malignant fate around
the caged souls of Macbeth and his partner, who are henceforth to be
prisoners in a world where “fog and filthy air” exclude the purer
light of heaven, a world in which the moral order of the universe
is upturned, and where “fair is foul and foul is fair.” The whole
after-action of the story passes in this darkened and shadowed light:
the forms of the principal characters starting out from a background of
crime, illumined as by the lurid gleam of a stormy sunset whose clouds
drip blood. And as the play advances the scene seems gradually shifted
into some unknown latitude of eternal night, where the voices of nature
are made to chorus the direful music of the witches’ incantation.
Throughout the drama this dominant note of evil is kept constantly
vibrating. Even for those whose hearts are free the poisoned air seems
to carry some taint of infection, and the imagination shudders at the
uneasy forebodings that haunt the soul of Banquo, who fears to trust
his assured integrity to the attacks of the secret agents of the dark.
Hold, take my sword.--There’s husbandry in heaven,
Their candles are all out.--Take thee that too.
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers!
Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!
_Macbeth_, indeed, in its imaginative setting is a play of the night;
and with unwearied imagery Shakespeare again and again appeals to the
forces of darkness as so many symbols of the black pall of crime that
weighs upon the souls of Macbeth and his wife. Nearly every page of
the drama yields some striking picture fit to conjure up such fears as
Banquo feels. Thus Macbeth himself on his way to the king’s chamber:
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep.
And, again, Lady Macbeth in the same scene:
It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern’st good-night.
And when the murder has been committed, Nature, through the lips of
Lenox, makes her own contribution to the picture:
The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ the air: strange screams of death
And, prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events,
New hatched to the woful time, the obscure bird
Clamour’d the live-long night: some say the earth
Was feverous and did shake.
How superbly is the effect of this description and its symbolic
significance again enforced by the words of Rosse in a subsequent
scene:
By the clock ’tis day
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp:
Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
When living light should kiss it?
The “night’s predominance” fit emblem of the deeds of this “woful
time” prevails to the end: and as Macbeth advances in his terrible
crusade his soul becomes attuned to its surroundings, and on the eve of
Banquo’s murder he calls darkness to his aid. “The west yet glimmers
with some streaks of day” when he utters that terrible invocation:
Come, seeling 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! Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood;
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
While night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.
Lady Macbeth had already anticipated the spirit of this dread summons
when, on the eve of Duncan’s coming to her castle, she cries out in the
impatience of her passionate impulse:
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!”
Through this realm of darkness, that knows no dawn till that last
hour when by the hand of Macduff “the time is free,” Shakespeare
conducts his characters with no uncertain step. Lit as by the light of
the under-world, the fell purpose of the guilty pair stands plainly
revealed to us on the very threshold of the drama: the seeds of murder
had been sown long ere the weird sisters have shrieked their fatal
preface to the action; and before we meet with either Macbeth or his
wife, the souls of both are already deeply dyed in blood. Nothing,
indeed, could be more absurd than to suggest that the murder of Duncan
is the fruit of sudden impulse on his part or hers; nor could anything
be more destructive of the whole scheme of the poet’s work than the
assumption that Macbeth’s enfeebled virtue was overborne by the satanic
strength of her will. We cannot too often remind ourselves that there
is no question of virtue here: it could not live in the air they had
learned to breathe: it has passed beyond the ken of minds that have
long brooded over crime. And it may be pointed out that Shakespeare
himself has been at particular pains to make this clear to us; for he
doubtless felt, and felt rightly, that unless the starting-point were
clearly kept in view, the subsequent development of the action, with
the contrast of character it is designed to illustrate, would lose
all significance. Therefore at the first entrance of Macbeth, when
the eulogy of others has but just pictured him to us as a soldier of
dauntless courage fighting loyally for his sovereign, we are allowed
to see that the thought of Duncan’s death has already found a lodging
in his heart. As the weird sisters lift the veil of the future and
point the dark way to the throne, the vision that presents itself to
his eyes is but the mirrored image of the bloody picture seated in
his own brain; and in foretelling the end, they wring from his lips a
confession of the means which he has already devised for its fulfilment:
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? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smothered in surmise; and nothing is
But what is not.
Then, like one affrighted by the echo of his own voice, he stands for
a moment appalled at the concrete shape into which these withered hags
have thrown his own phantasy, and, seeking to ignore, what he knows but
too well, that in this dread business fate and he are one, tries to
cheat his senses with the soothing anodyne that he may yet escape the
responsibilities of action:
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
But this mood lasts only a little while, for in the next scene, even
while his grateful sovereign is loading him with honours, his dark
purpose is seen to have taken still more defined shape:
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.
All this, be it observed, takes place before the meeting between
himself and his wife. But it needed not his coming to enable her to
divine his thoughts or to force her to confess her own. His written
message to her contains no hint of murder, and yet the words she
utters, as she holds his letter in her hands, have no meaning unless
we suppose that the violent death of Duncan had long been the subject
of conjugal debate. She has watched the working of the poison in his
breast, and has already anticipated the hesitation which he afterwards
displays. How far her generous interpretation of his halting action
accords with the real character of the man we shall presently see
for ourselves: but for the moment her speech suffices to afford the
clearest evidence that he had already imparted to her his guilty
purpose:
Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the 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 would’st highly,
That thou would’st holily; would’st not play false,
And yet would’st wrongly win.
And that we may be in no doubt as to the original source from which
this diabolical plot proceeded, Shakespeare makes the truth doubly
plain to us in a subsequent passage. When the hesitation, which she had
feared, threatens to wreck their cherished scheme of crime, she reminds
him that in its inception the idea was his, not hers:
What beast was’t, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
* * * * *
Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you.
Nor, indeed, would the conduct of either be humanly explicable
unless we clearly grasp the situation as it is here plainly stated
by Shakespeare. Her superlative strength in executive resource is
only consistent with the assumption that she has accepted without
questioning a policy that was none of her own devising: his apparent
weakness, on the other hand, is the inevitable attitude of an
imaginative temperament which feels all the responsibilities and
forecasts the consequences of the crime it has conceived.
And this brings us to a consideration of the particular types of
character which have been chosen by Shakespeare for the two principal
figures of his tragedy. I have suggested that the ideal motive of the
drama lies in its contrast of the distinctive qualities of sex as
these are developed under the pressure of a combined purpose and a
common experience: and it will be found, at any rate, that the special
individuality which the author has assigned to Macbeth not less than
to his wife aptly serves the end I have supposed he had in view. Dr.
Johnson has said of the play, that “it has no nice discriminations
of character; the events are too great to admit the influence of
particular dispositions, and the course of the action necessarily
determines the conduct of the agents.” This, of course, is putting the
matter too crudely. Shakespeare was not wont to deal in abstractions,
though by the force of his imagination he could so inform his work
as to raise the exhibition of individual nature into an image of our
common humanity. Still less can he be accused of inventing mere puppets
with no other function than to carry the chosen legend to its close.
His characters always outlive the particular circumstances in which
they are employed: they are enriched by a thousand touches of reality
not absolutely needed for the requirements of the scene, which allow
us to pursue them in imagination beyond the margin of the printed
page. But there is at least this truth underlying Johnson’s criticism,
that, accepting the malign influences under which their natures are
exhibited, there is nothing abnormal in the character of either; and
that what is particularly distinctive about them has been added with
the view of giving ideal emphasis to tendencies that are common to us
all.
We shall realise this the better as we come to examine more nearly
their conduct and bearing towards the one terrible circumstance that
dominates the lives of both. For it must never be forgotten that in the
play of _Macbeth_ the murder of Duncan means all. It is the touchstone
by which temperament and disposition are tried and developed; the
instrument of evolution which the poet has found ready to his hand,
and which he has wielded with all the extraordinary force of his
genius. The first of a long list of horrors committed by Macbeth, it
nevertheless in essence contains them all; and though it hurries his
unfortunate partner by a more terrible passage to a swifter doom, it
illumines as by lightning-flashes every phase of the woman’s nature,
from the first passionate impulse of evil to the remorse that cannot
find refuge even in madness, and is only silenced by death.
On the threshold of this terrible adventure in what mood do we find
them? The project, as we have seen, is no stranger to the breast of
either, and yet with what strangely different effect has the poison
worked its spell! They have been apart, and the soul of each has been
thrown back upon itself. In the thick of action, “disdaining fortune
with his brandished steel,” Macbeth has become infirm of purpose: alone
in her castle at Inverness, Lady Macbeth has brooded over the crime
until it has completely possessed her. With the concentration of a
woman’s nature, she has driven from her brain all other thoughts save
this: and she waits now with impatient expectancy for the hour that
shall put her courage to the proof. Here, as we see, the divergence of
sex has already asserted itself, working such a transformation that
when they meet they scarcely recognise one another. The sudden coming
of the occasion so long plotted and desired by both has hastened the
development of individual character. He finds in the “dearest partner”
of his greatness a being so formidable that he regards her for the
moment with feelings of mingled admiration and dismay:
Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted metal should compose
Nothing but males.
And though, with the woman’s finer instinct, she has partly divined
and anticipated his mood, she is appalled at the extent of the change
it has wrought in him. Beneath the armour of the valiant soldier she
finds, as she thinks, the trembling heart of a coward, and struck with
sudden terror at his failing purpose, she tries to recall him to his
former self:
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.
From this moment they are strangers in spirit, though the old bond
still holds them together. And yet to us, who view the whole picture
with the poet’s larger vision, the process of development moves in
obedience to inevitable law. For at such a crisis it is natural in
a man to anticipate: in a woman to remember; on the eve of action
he looks forward with apprehension: on the morrow she looks back
with regret; and while his nature is stronger in restraint, hers, on
the contrary, surrenders itself more completely to the passion of
remorse. The finer moral feelings of a woman are retrospective, for
her imagination feeds and broods upon the past. She is often more
intrepid in action because the intensity of her purpose bars the view
of consequence; and whether the enterprise be heroic or malign, her
indifference to danger, which then far surpasses the courage of man,
is never so superbly illustrated as when she labours in his service,
and not for any ends of her own. And so it happens that where she only
follows she sometimes seems to lead, and the man, who has devised the
policy which her readier resource only avails to carry into execution,
appears in the guise of the reluctant victim of her stronger purpose
and more undaunted will.
In order the better to exhibit these tendencies of her sex, Shakespeare
has pictured for us in Lady Macbeth a woman of the highest nervous
organisation, whose deep devotion gives to her character a passionate
intensity of purpose that seems at times to be more than human. While
the troubled surface of Macbeth’s mind sends back but a blurred image
of the dark secret that it hides, in her transparent nature the guilty
project of his ambition is clearly and sharply mirrored. Before the
murder of Duncan she can see nothing but the crime and its reward, that
crime--
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.
Macbeth’s message has reminded her that the time is drawing near, and
she resolves to chase from his brain--
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
which the witches have placed upon his brow. In the next moment she
hears of the king’s expected arrival, and then she knows that the hour
so long awaited has come at last, and she nerves herself for the one
supreme effort of her life:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. 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!
But it is a vain cry; for throughout the terrible experiences of the
next few hours the feminine nature is ever dominant. If there are no
women save those who deal in gentle deeds, then Jael did not drive the
nail into the forehead of Sisera, and it was not Judith’s hand that
compassed the death of Holofernes. And yet, if such as they were truly
of the sex which claims them, by a still firmer title may we say of
Lady Macbeth that she is every inch a woman. It is the woman who in
this same scene greets her husband on his return:
Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.
And in “the instant” she now lives, looking neither before nor after;
for the future that she sees stretches no further than the dreaded
deed which is to bring fulfilment of all their cherished hopes. As she
has shut out the past, with whatever compassionate scruples it might
recall, so in like manner her fixed concentration on the business in
hand excludes all vision of the time to come. If she had been endowed
with Macbeth’s imagination, which could ride so swiftly on the track
of consequence, Duncan would indeed have gone forth on the morrow as
he purposed. It needed this fatal combination to effect what neither
would have accomplished alone--the man’s guilty conception poisoning
and possessing the woman’s soul, the woman’s surrender to his will so
complete and passionate that when he falters she stands before him as
the glittering image of his former self, a superb creation of his own
brain, endowed with all, and more than all, the courage he had lost.
This is Lady Macbeth on the eve of Duncan’s murder. From the moment
that she perceives his wavering resolution she takes the yoke of action
on to her own shoulders. She contrives and schemes every detail of the
crime, and with ever-increasing impetuosity urges his failing footsteps
towards the goal he now fears to reach. But the precious moments
are speeding onward, and her passionate arguments seem powerless to
lift his sickened spirit; till at the last, with all the rhetoric of
despair, she presents to his affrighted gaze a blackened image of
herself, thinking, as well she may, that such a vision will prove more
potent than curses to fan into flame the dying embers of his resolve:
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.
It seems almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that this
frenzied appeal has over and again been accepted as Lady Macbeth’s
judicial report upon her own character. A speech which is conceived in
the most daring spirit of dramatic fitness, and which bears in every
word the stamp of the special purpose for which it is uttered, is
transformed into a prosaic statement of fact; and we can only wonder we
are not also invited to believe that this somewhat rigorous treatment
of the young accounts for the fact that the play contains no mention of
the lady’s surviving offspring.
When the scene in which the awful passage occurs has drawn to its
close, Lady Macbeth’s task is already more than half accomplished.
Her fiery eloquence has roused him from his stupor, and, inspired by
the dauntless spirit which he had himself inspired, he bends up “each
corporal agent to this terrible feat.” But she does not rest until all
is finished; she never falters till the goal is passed. The woman’s
quivering nerves, more potent than the iron sinews of a giant, bear her
up safely to the end; and then, with a woman’s weakness, they break,
not beneath the weight they bear, but beneath the weight they have
borne. So long as the need of action endures she remains unflinching
and undismayed. It is she who drugs the grooms in preparation for the
murder: it is she who at the supreme moment, when he can do no more,
revisits the chamber of death to complete what he has left undone:
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.
A speech which shows how little she knew herself; for throughout all
her brief after-life this picture of “the sleeping and the dead” is
set in flames before her haunted vision and burnt with fire into the
depths of her soul.