remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take
place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision of the dagger,
the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady
Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of
a storm, or, 'black and midnight hags,' receive Macbeth in a cavern. The
blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and
that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint
glimmerings of the western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the
hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when
Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when 'light
thickens,' when 'night's black agents to their prey do rouse,' when the
wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals
forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his
'black' desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to
come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down and no stars
shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes
unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the
little bell. When the next day should dawn, its light is 'strangled,'
and 'darkness does the face of earth entomb.' In the whole drama the sun
seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage
where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and,
afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth
of its shame. Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I
notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her
fear of darkness; 'she has light by her continually.' And in the one
phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the
darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.[195]
The atmosphere of _Macbeth_, however, is not that of unrelieved
blackness. On the contrary, as compared with _King Lear_ and its cold
dim gloom, _Macbeth_ leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really
the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour,
sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the
thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth's
eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the
servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court
to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his
father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of
the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the
blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron
from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed
to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady
Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be
an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not
merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by
reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches,
after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when
there staggers onto it a 'bloody man,' gashed with wounds. His tale is
of a hero whose 'brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,' 'carved
out a passage' to his enemy, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
chaps.' And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the
combatants seemed as if they 'meant to bathe in reeking wounds.' What
metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets
us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to
thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures
are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with
Banquo's 'blood upon his face'; of Banquo himself 'with twenty trenched
gashes on his head,' or 'blood-bolter'd' and smiling in derision at his
murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole
green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away
from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of
Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are
those of her shuddering cry, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?' And it is not only at such moments that
these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and
Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland
as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her
wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined
mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When
Macbeth, before Banquo's murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender
eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him
pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as
covered with blood.
Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of
the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of _Macbeth_
almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its
atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast
and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of
the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of
sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out
like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a
rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury;--all keep the imagination moving on a 'wild and
violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on
thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the
drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
of storm.
Now all these agencies--darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
images--conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
words of the Witches stir the same feelings,--those, for example, of the
spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks,
and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam
that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for
pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the
babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the
murderer's gibbet. In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work,
sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural malice. She labours with
portents.
Lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible,
burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan's horses
devour each other in frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it.
Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the croak of the
raven, the light thickening after sunset, the home-coming of the rooks,
are all ominous. Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare
has concentrated attention on the obscurer regions of man's being, on
phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces
lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as
the relapse of Macbeth from conversation into a reverie, during which he
gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer and closer; the
writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show; the
pressure of imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a
dagger in the air, at first bright, then suddenly splashed with blood,
or the sound of a voice that cried 'Sleep no more' and would not be
silenced.[196] To these are added other, and constant, allusions to
sleep, man's strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its
withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts
from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and
again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; in the two men, of whom one
during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the other raised a
cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in
somnambulism those scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to
madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to excite supernatural
alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its
recognised seat but all through and around our mysterious nature.
Perhaps there is no other work equal to _Macbeth_ in the production of
this effect.[197]
It is enhanced--to take a last point--by the use of a literary
expedient. Not even in _Richard III._, which in this, as in other
respects, has resemblances to _Macbeth_, is there so much of Irony. I do
not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example,
where the speaker is intentionally ironical, like that of Lennox in III.
vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical
juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the 'Sophoclean
irony' by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to the audience,
in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, hidden from
himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage. The very
first words uttered by Macbeth,
So foul and fair a day I have not seen,
are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle
the reader by recalling the words of the Witches in the first scene,
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles
saying, 'Let us toward the King,' his words are innocent, but to the
reader have a double meaning. Duncan's comment on the treachery of
Cawdor,
There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust,
is interrupted[198] by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is
greeted with effusive gratitude and a like 'absolute trust.' I have
already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which
Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the
reader Lady Macbeth's light words,
A little water clears us of this deed:
How easy is it then,
summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the
Porter's speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate,
shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the
hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child,
and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further
examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he
rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth's reminder, 'Fail
not our feast.' 'My lord, I will not,' he replies, and he keeps his
promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this
play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden
forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence.[199]
2
But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet
considered. It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe
anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the
reader.[200] Nor do I believe that among different readers this
influence differs greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to
analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it,
they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us
in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either
through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that
effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the Witches,
whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be
exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the
action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates,
whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the
other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action,
it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the
unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a
criticism on these views.
(1) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes,
the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him
and in books like Reginald Scot's _Discovery_ (1584). And he used these
ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the
sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever
could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious
attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates,
or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor
and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in
killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors'
wives who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards
a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh
Evans would have known better.[201] There is not a syllable in _Macbeth_
to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with
the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain
supernatural powers. They can 'raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull
weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to
place in the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to
come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
these phrases and sentences at once to passages in _Macbeth_. They are
all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the current
superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare
mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of
course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
accessible authority.[202] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main
source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion,
the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as
ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.'
But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely
nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he _used_
what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the
phrase 'weird sisters,'[203] which certainly no more suggested to a
London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than
it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are
'_instruments_ of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters' (IV. i.
63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate
appears are Shakespeare's,[204] that will not help the Witches; for they
are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess or superior devil, not a
fate.[205]
Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very
great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.
There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions
of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
Witches, or of their 'masters,' or of Hecate. It is needless therefore
to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his
whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are presented
simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they
are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in
_Hamlet_, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello. Macbeth is, in the
ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled
by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the
first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is
made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even
startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to
them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely
how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would
have started, as he did, with a start of _fear_ at the mere prophecy of
a crown, or have conceived thereupon _immediately_ the thought of
murder. Either this thought was not new to him,[206] or he had cherished
at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence
of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an
inward and terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to
accept or resist the temptation, but the temptation was already within
him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him with
Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his
temptation came to him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we
use the word 'temptation' in reference to the first prophecies of the
Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
himself. _He_ speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in
fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events: they hailed him
as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. No connection
of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have
fulfilled the prophecy any day.[207] In any case, the idea of fulfilling
it by murder was entirely his own.[208]
When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and
Banquo, we observe, however, a striking change. They no longer need to
go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his
course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but
they also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure. We have
no hope that he will reject their advice; but so far are they from
having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that they make
careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though
to intimate how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies
with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act after this interview one
for which his tempters gave him not a hint--the slaughter of Macduff's
wife and children.
To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion
that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He
curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to
them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the
mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as
may be found in _King Lear_ and occasionally elsewhere. He appears
actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological genesis
of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate
notion of Schlegel's that the Witches were required because natural
agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a man as Macbeth to
his first murder.
'Still,' it may be said, 'the Witches did foreknow Macbeth's future; and
what is foreknown is fixed; and how can a man be responsible when his
future is fixed?' With this question, as a speculative one, we have no
concern here; but, in so far as it relates to the play, I answer, first,
that not one of the things foreknown is an action. This is just as true
of the later prophecies as of the first. That Macbeth will be harmed by
none of woman born, and will never be vanquished till Birnam Wood shall
come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his.
It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced
prophecies of Macbeth's deeds, even if it had been convenient to do so;
he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the
interest of the inward struggle and suffering. And, in the second place,
_Macbeth_ was not written for students of metaphysics or theology, but
for people at large; and, however it may be with prophecies of actions,
prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of
difficulty about responsibility. Many people, perhaps most, habitually
think of their 'future' as something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.'
The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and
when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of £1000 a year, or
prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is
struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he
is going to lose his glorious 'freedom'--not though journeys and
marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to
Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that
Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative
problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.
(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According
to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as
symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered
in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.
With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere
external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual
meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a
'philosophy' of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of
them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other
respects, inadequate.
It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.
Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of
the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware
of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his
fear aright' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no
suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became
Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious,
about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held--and
rightly, I think--that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward,
the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate,
much less imaginative effect than the others,--even that they are in
_Macbeth_ an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still
they are there, and they are essential to the plot.[209] And as the
theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to
which it can in some measure be applied.