After these ways: so, it will make us mad,
she says, with a sudden and great seriousness. And when he goes panting
on, 'Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more,"' ... she breaks in,
'What do you mean?' half-doubting whether this was not a real voice that
he heard. Then, almost directly, she recovers herself, convinced of the
vanity of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself any better than
him. She never suspects that these deeds _must_ be thought after these
ways; that her facile realism,
A little water clears us of this deed,
will one day be answered by herself, 'Will these hands ne'er be clean?'
or that the fatal commonplace, 'What's done is done,' will make way for
her last despairing sentence, 'What's done cannot be undone.'
Hence the development of her character--perhaps it would be more
strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind--is both
inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth.
When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first
reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the
shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The
first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the
discovery, she faints.[229] When next we see her, Queen of Scotland, the
glory of her dream has faded. She enters, disillusioned, and weary with
want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and gained nothing:
Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Henceforth she has no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut
through. Her husband, physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had
foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into the foreground, and
she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he
rarely needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should
not betray his misery. He plans the murder of Banquo without her
knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows love
of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even
when she is told vaguely of his intention she appears but little
interested. In the sudden emergency of the banquet scene she makes a
prodigious and magnificent effort; her strength, and with it her
ascendancy, returns, and she saves her husband at least from an open
disclosure. But after this she takes no part whatever in the action. We
only know from her shuddering words in the sleep-walking scene, 'The
Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?' that she has even learned
of her husband's worst crime; and in all the horrors of his tyranny over
Scotland she has, so far as we hear, no part. Disillusionment and
despair prey upon her more and more. That she should seek any relief in
speech, or should ask for sympathy, would seem to her mere weakness, and
would be to Macbeth's defiant fury an irritation. Thinking of the change
in him, we imagine the bond between them slackened, and Lady Macbeth
left much alone. She sinks slowly downward. She cannot bear darkness,
and has light by her continually: 'tis her command. At last her nature,
not her will, gives way. The secrets of the past find vent in a disorder
of sleep, the beginning perhaps of madness. What the doctor fears is
clear. He reports to her husband no great physical mischief, but bids
her attendant to remove from her all means by which she could harm
herself, and to keep eyes on her constantly. It is in vain. Her death is
announced by a cry from her women so sudden and direful that it would
thrill her husband with horror if he were any longer capable of fear. In
the last words of the play Malcolm tells us it is believed in the
hostile army that she died by her own hand. And (not to speak of the
indications just referred to) it is in accordance with her character
that even in her weakest hour she should cut short by one determined
stroke the agony of her life.
The sinking of Lady Macbeth's nature, and the marked change in her
demeanour to her husband, are most strikingly shown in the conclusion of
the banquet scene; and from this point pathos is mingled with awe. The
guests are gone. She is completely exhausted, and answers Macbeth in
listless, submissive words which seem to come with difficulty. How
strange sounds the reply 'Did you send to him, sir?' to his imperious
question about Macduff! And when he goes on, 'waxing desperate in
imagination,' to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the
thought, and there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once
of her care for him and of the misery she herself has silently endured,
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than
as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.
Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound,[230] she is, up
to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has;
and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up
to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication
of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from
mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary
contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the
way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise _him_. She
evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is
the proper place. Her commanding attitude in the moments of his
hesitation or fear is probably confined to them. If we consider the
peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and
if we examine the language of the wife and husband at other times, we
shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual relations are
better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though
naturally they are not truly represented by either. Her ambition for her
husband and herself (there was no distinction to her mind) proved fatal
to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when
she pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what
he merely lacked the nerve to attempt; and her part in the crime was so
much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and undramatic
task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should
surely have to assign the larger share to Macbeth.
'Lady Macbeth,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is merely detested'; and for a long
time critics generally spoke of her as though she were Malcolm's
'fiend-like queen.' In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I have
been doing, on the other and less obvious side; and in the criticism of
the last century there is even a tendency to sentimentalise the
character. But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare meant the
predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that
he never meant this impression to be lost, however it might be modified,
as Lady Macbeth's activity diminishes and her misery increases. I cannot
believe that, when she said of Banquo and Fleance,
But in them nature's copy's not eterne,
she meant only that they would some day die; or that she felt any
surprise when Macbeth replied,
There's comfort yet: they are assailable;
though I am sure no light came into her eyes when he added those
dreadful words, 'Then be thou jocund.' She was listless. She herself
would not have moved a finger against Banquo. But she thought his death,
and his son's death, might ease her husband's mind, and she suggested
the murders indifferently and without remorse. The sleep-walking scene,
again, inspires pity, but its main effect is one of awe. There is great
horror in the references to blood, but it cannot be said that there is
more than horror; and Campbell was surely right when, in alluding to
Mrs. Jameson's analysis, he insisted that in Lady Macbeth's misery there
is no trace of contrition.[231] Doubtless she would have given the world
to undo what she had done; and the thought of it killed her; but,
regarding her from the tragic point of view, we may truly say she was
too great to repent.[232]
2
The main interest of the character of Banquo arises from the changes
that take place in him, and from the influence of the Witches upon him.
And it is curious that Shakespeare's intention here is so frequently
missed. Banquo being at first strongly contrasted with Macbeth, as an
innocent man with a guilty, it seems to be supposed that this contrast
must be continued to his death; while, in reality, though it is never
removed, it is gradually diminished. Banquo in fact may be described
much more truly than Macbeth as the victim of the Witches. If we follow
his story this will be evident.
He bore a part only less distinguished than Macbeth's in the battles
against Sweno and Macdonwald. He and Macbeth are called 'our captains,'
and when they meet the Witches they are traversing the 'blasted
heath'[233] alone together. Banquo accosts the strange shapes without
the slightest fear. They lay their fingers on their lips, as if to
signify that they will not, or must not, speak to _him_. To Macbeth's
brief appeal, 'Speak, if you can: what are you?' they at once reply, not
by saying what they are, but by hailing him Thane of Glamis, Thane of
Cawdor, and King hereafter. Banquo is greatly surprised that his partner
should start as if in fear, and observes that he is at once 'rapt'; and
he bids the Witches, if they know the future, to prophesy to _him_, who
neither begs their favour nor fears their hate. Macbeth, looking back at
a later time, remembers Banquo's daring, and how
he chid the sisters,
When first they put the name of king upon me,
And bade them speak to him.
'Chid' is an exaggeration; but Banquo is evidently a bold man, probably
an ambitious one, and certainly has no lurking guilt in his ambition. On
hearing the predictions concerning himself and his descendants he makes
no answer, and when the Witches are about to vanish he shows none of
Macbeth's feverish anxiety to know more. On their vanishing he is simply
amazed, wonders if they were anything but hallucinations, makes no
reference to the predictions till Macbeth mentions them, and then
answers lightly.
When Ross and Angus, entering, announce to Macbeth that he has been made
Thane of Cawdor, Banquo exclaims, aside, to himself or Macbeth, 'What!
can the devil speak true?' He now believes that the Witches were real
beings and the 'instruments of darkness.' When Macbeth, turning to him,
whispers,
Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me
Promised no less to them?
he draws with the boldness of innocence the inference which is really
occupying Macbeth, and answers,
That, trusted home,
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown
Besides the thane of Cawdor.
Here he still speaks, I think, in a free, off-hand, even jesting,[234]
manner ('enkindle' meaning merely 'excite you to _hope_ for'). But then,
possibly from noticing something in Macbeth's face, he becomes graver,
and goes on, with a significant 'but,'
But 'tis strange:
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.
He afterwards observes for the second time that his partner is 'rapt';
but he explains his abstraction naturally and sincerely by referring to
the surprise of his new honours; and at the close of the scene, when
Macbeth proposes that they shall discuss the predictions together at
some later time, he answers in the cheerful, rather bluff manner, which
he has used almost throughout, 'Very gladly.' Nor was there any reason
why Macbeth's rejoinder, 'Till then, enough,' should excite misgivings
in him, though it implied a request for silence, and though the whole
behaviour of his partner during the scene must have looked very
suspicious to him when the prediction of the crown was made good through
the murder of Duncan.
In the next scene Macbeth and Banquo join the King, who welcomes them
both with the kindest expressions of gratitude and with promises of
favours to come. Macbeth has indeed already received a noble reward.
Banquo, who is said by the King to have 'no less deserved,' receives as
yet mere thanks. His brief and frank acknowledgment is contrasted with
Macbeth's laboured rhetoric; and, as Macbeth goes out, Banquo turns with
hearty praises of him to the King.
And when next we see him, approaching Macbeth's castle in company with
Duncan, there is still no sign of change. Indeed he gains on us. It is
he who speaks the beautiful lines,
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate;
--lines which tell of that freedom of heart, and that sympathetic sense
of peace and beauty, which the Macbeth of the tragedy could never feel.
But now Banquo's sky begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act
we see him with Fleance crossing the court of the castle on his way to
bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night seems to oppress him.
And he is oppressed by something else.
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!
On Macbeth's entrance we know what Banquo means: he says to
Macbeth--and it is the first time he refers to the subject unprovoked,
I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.
His will is still untouched: he would repel the 'cursed thoughts'; and
they are mere thoughts, not intentions. But still they are 'thoughts,'
something more, probably, than mere recollections; and they bring with
them an undefined sense of guilt. The poison has begun to work.
The passage that follows Banquo's words to Macbeth is difficult to
interpret:
I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
To you they have show'd some truth.
_Macb._ I think not of them:
Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,
We would spend it in some words upon that business,
If you would grant the time.
_Ban._ At your kind'st leisure.
_Macb._ If you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,
It shall make honour for you.
_Ban._ So I lose none
In seeking to augment it, but still keep
My bosom franchised and allegiance clear,
I shall be counsell'd.
_Macb._ Good repose the while!
_Ban._ Thanks, sir: the like to you!
Macbeth's first idea is, apparently, simply to free himself from any
suspicion which the discovery of the murder might suggest, by showing
himself, just before it, quite indifferent to the predictions, and
merely looking forward to a conversation about them at some future time.
But why does he go on, 'If you shall cleave,' etc.? Perhaps he foresees
that, on the discovery, Banquo cannot fail to suspect him, and thinks it
safest to prepare the way at once for an understanding with him (in the
original story he makes Banquo his accomplice _before_ the murder).
Banquo's answer shows three things,--that he fears a treasonable
proposal, that he has no idea of accepting it, and that he has no fear
of Macbeth to restrain him from showing what is in his mind.
Duncan is murdered. In the scene of discovery Banquo of course appears,
and his behaviour is significant. When he enters, and Macduff cries out
to him,
O Banquo, Banquo,
Our royal master's murdered,
and Lady Macbeth, who has entered a moment before, exclaims,
Woe, alas!
What, in our house?
his answer,
Too cruel anywhere,
shows, as I have pointed out, repulsion, and we may be pretty sure that
he suspects the truth at once. After a few words to Macduff he remains
absolutely silent while the scene is continued for nearly forty lines.
He is watching Macbeth and listening as he tells how he put the
chamberlains to death in a frenzy of loyal rage. At last Banquo appears
to have made up his mind. On Lady Macbeth's fainting he proposes that
they shall all retire, and that they shall afterwards meet,
And question this most bloody piece of work
To know it further. Fears and scruples[235] shake us:
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence
Against the undivulged pretence[236] I fight
Of treasonous malice.
His solemn language here reminds us of his grave words about 'the
instruments of darkness,' and of his later prayer to the 'merciful
powers.' He is profoundly shocked, full of indignation, and determined
to play the part of a brave and honest man.
But he plays no such part. When next we see him, on the last day of his
life, we find that he has yielded to evil. The Witches and his own
ambition have conquered him. He alone of the lords knew of the
prophecies, but he has said nothing of them. He has acquiesced in
Macbeth's accession, and in the official theory that Duncan's sons had
suborned the chamberlains to murder him. Doubtless, unlike Macduff, he
was present at Scone to see the new king invested. He has, not formally
but in effect, 'cloven to' Macbeth's 'consent'; he is knit to him by 'a
most indissoluble tie'; his advice in council has been 'most grave and
prosperous'; he is to be the 'chief guest' at that night's supper. And
his soliloquy tells us why:
Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
Thou play'dst most foully for't: yet it was said
It should not stand in thy posterity,
But that myself should be the root and father
Of many kings. If there come truth from them--
As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine--
Why, by the verities on thee made good,
May they not be my oracles as well,
And set me up in hope? But hush! no more.
This 'hush! no more' is not the dismissal of 'cursed thoughts': it only
means that he hears the trumpets announcing the entrance of the King and
Queen.
His punishment comes swiftly, much more swiftly than Macbeth's, and
saves him from any further fall. He is a very fearless man, and still so
far honourable that he has no thought of acting to bring about the
fulfilment of the prophecy which has beguiled him. And therefore he has
no fear of Macbeth. But he little understands him. To Macbeth's
tormented mind Banquo's conduct appears highly suspicious. _Why_ has
this bold and circumspect[237] man kept his secret and become his chief
adviser? In order to make good _his_ part of the predictions after
Macbeth's own precedent. Banquo, he is sure, will suddenly and secretly
attack him. It is not the far-off accession of Banquo's descendants that
he fears; it is (so he tells himself) swift murder; not that the 'barren
sceptre' will some day droop from his dying hand, but that it will be
'wrenched' away now (III. i. 62).[238] So he kills Banquo. But the
Banquo he kills is not the innocent soldier who met the Witches and
daffed their prophecies aside, nor the man who prayed to be delivered
from the temptation of his dreams.
_Macbeth_ leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of
a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime. And the strength of
this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is admired by
readers who shrink from _Othello_ and are made unhappy by _Lear_. But
what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play,
was the _incalculability_ of evil,--that in meddling with it human
beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of
such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you
introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and
particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea
of the reaction you will provoke. All you can be sure of is that it will
not be what you expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it.
Banquo's story, if truly apprehended, produces this impression quite as
strongly as the more terrific stories of the chief characters, and
perhaps even more clearly, inasmuch as he is nearer to average human
nature, has obviously at first a quiet conscience, and uses with evident
sincerity the language of religion.
3
Apart from his story Banquo's character is not very interesting, nor is
it, I think, perfectly individual. And this holds good of the rest of
the minor characters. They are sketched lightly, and are seldom
developed further than the strict purposes of the action required. From
this point of view they are inferior to several of the less important
figures in each of the other three tragedies. The scene in which Lady
Macduff and her child appear, and the passage where their slaughter is
reported to Macduff, have much dramatic value, but in neither case is
the effect due to any great extent to the special characters of the
persons concerned. Neither they, nor Duncan, nor Malcolm, nor even
Banquo himself, have been imagined intensely, and therefore they do not
produce that sense of unique personality which Shakespeare could convey
in a much smaller number of lines than he gives to most of them.[239]
And this is of course even more the case with persons like Ross, Angus,
and Lennox, though each of these has distinguishable features. I doubt
if any other great play of Shakespeare's contains so many speeches which
a student of the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to
assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second
scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons
should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible. Can
he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the
speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii. and iii., or to
determine that Malcolm must have spoken I. iv. 2-11? Most of this
writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare's writing, not that of
Shakespeare become another person. And can anything like the same
proportion of such writing be found in _Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _King
Lear_?
Is it possible to guess the reason of this characteristic of _Macbeth_?
I cannot believe it is due to the presence of a second hand. The
writing, mangled by the printer and perhaps by 'the players,' seems to
be sometimes obviously Shakespeare's, sometimes sufficiently
Shakespearean to repel any attack not based on external evidence. It may
be, as the shortness of the play has suggested to some, that Shakespeare
was hurried, and, throwing all his weight on the principal characters,
did not exert himself in dealing with the rest. But there is another
possibility which may be worth considering. _Macbeth_ is distinguished
by its simplicity,--by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by
simplicity. The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple,
except in comparison with such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in
almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality. Its plot is
quite plain. It has very little intermixture of humour. It has little
pathos except of the sternest kind. The style, for Shakespeare, has not
much variety, being generally kept at a higher pitch than in the other
three tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of
verse and prose.[240] All this makes for simplicity of effect. And, this
being so, is it not possible that Shakespeare instinctively felt, or
consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to the
subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good
artist, sacrificed a part to the whole? And was he wrong? He has
certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in _King Lear_,
and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a
dramatic poem, and as a drama superior.