Concluding MM's 'General Macbeth' & Beginning bloggerlees on 'Othello'

Macbeth, in short, shows life in the cave. Without religion, animism rules the outer world, and without faith, the human soul is beset

by hobgoblins. This at any rate was Shakespeare's opinion, to which modern history, with the return of the irrational in the Fascist nightmare and its new specters of Communism, Socialism, etc., lends support. It is a troubling thought that Macbeth, of all Shakespeare's characters, should seem the most "modern," the only

one you could transpose into contemporary battle dress or a sport shirt and slacks.

The contemporary Macbeth, a churchgoer, is indifferent to religion, to the categorical imperative or any group of principles that may be held to stand above and govern human behavior. Like the old Macbeth, he'd gladly skip the future life, not only for himself but for the rest of humanity. He listens to soothsayers and prophets

and has been out on the heath and in the desert, interfering with Nature on a grand scale, lest his rivals for power get ahead of him and Banquo's stock, instead of his, inherit the earth-why this

should have seemed such a catastrophe to the real Macbeth, who had no children, is a mystery the scholars never mention. Unloosing the potential destructiveness that was always there in Nature, as Shakespeare understood, the contemporary Macbeth, like the old one, is not even a monster, though he may breed monsters, thanks

to his activities on the heath; he is timorous, unimaginative, and the prayer he would like to say most fervently is simply "Amen."

MM June 1962

The Noble Moor - Othello and Race in Elizabethan London

                            

The Noble Moor – Othello and Race in Elizabethan London

Richard Lees suggests Shakespeare’s complex and sympathetic 

representation of the ‘noble Moor’ is the product of a unique 

moment in England’s involvement in the slave trade.

2007 marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire and, at the time of writing this article, it seemed an appropriate moment to re-consider Othello in relation both to slavery and to Elizabethan representations of black Africans.

Shakespeare lived and worked during the early period of European colonial expansion, when countries like England, France, Portugal and Spain were beginning to carve up the world for their own profit and power, seizing territories in Africa, Asia and, most notably, the ‘new world’ of the Americas. This profit-led expansion would result ultimately in the brutal subjugation of native populations, the ruthless exploitation of natural resources and the systematic destruction of ancient cultures and civilizations on four continents. The economic system which evolved to drive this colonial expansion – the transatlantic slave trade – would lead to the kidnapping, transportation and forced labour of at least 12 million black Africans over a period of 250 years.

Early voyages...

However, when Othello was first performed in 1604, English involvement in the slave trade was in abeyance, a temporary remission which holds the key to understanding how a more ‘sympathetic’ or, at least, a more complex dramatic representation of a black character could have been possible. Four decades earlier, in the 1560s, Sir John Hawkins, one of the Elizabethan seagoing ‘heroes’ of the ‘Age of Discoveries’, led the earliest English slave trading expeditions to Africa – a mixture of public and private enterprise, financed by London merchants and supported by the Queen herself. His first voyage to Sierra Leone in 1562 proved highly profitable: seizing 300 Africans ‘by the sword’, Hawkins crossed the Atlantic and sold his cargo to Spanish traders. Returning to England with prized tropical products such as ginger, sugar and hides, which he sold to London merchants, Hawkins made a fortune.

... and a disastrous expedition

This ‘success’ led to a second expedition, backed by City merchants, noblemen and the Queen, who lent Hawkins a 700 tonne royal ship, the ‘Jesus of Lubeck’. Going back to Sierra Leone in 1564 – the year Shakespeare was born – Hawkins captured 400 black Africans, and made huge profits selling them to the Spanish in the West Indies before returning to England and a knighthood. His third voyage in 1567-68, however, proved a disaster. With six ships, including two royal vessels, he returned to West Africa, seized 500 Africans and a Portuguese slave ship before sailing for the Caribbean. Bad weather forced his ships to take refuge in a Mexican port where they were trapped by a hostile Spanish fleet. Though Hawkins escaped, both royal ships were captured, the human cargo seized and all profits lost; an outcome which effectively ended English involvement in the transatlantic slave trade for over forty years.

The ‘inferior’ heathen

To do what they did, Hawkins and his London backers assumed a doctrine of white Christian supremacy over ‘inferior heathen’ races; an ideology enabling them to capture black Africans, then transport, trade and work them like animals without the slightest moral anxiety. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that literary and theatrical representations of black Africans in Elizabethan culture were generally – though not wholly – negative. Elizabethans may have found travellers’ accounts of African peoples intriguingly exotic, yet the pervading stereotype to emerge from the plays they watched equated blackness with cannibalism, cruelty, animal sexuality and the devil. Dramatic representations were often damning. Muley Hamet in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1589) is closely associated with satanic practices and witchcraft. A black character called Eleazar in Lust’s Dominion is stereotyped as sexually rampant; and in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Aaron the Moor is motivated by a chilling combination of brutal cruelty and sexual predation.

Some notable exceptions

Yet, not every theatrical characterization re-enforced these negative stereotypes, and depictions of higher status characters were often more positive. King Mullisheg in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West is portrayed as generous and gallant, rational and poetic; Greene’s Orlando Furioso and Webster’s The Thracian Wonder both represent Moorish kings as noble and honourable men.

Heroic not barbaric

In Othello, Shakespeare draws immediately on the contradictions in this culture. Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio describe ‘the Moor’ as ugly, barbaric and sexually bestial – the conventional racist stereotype of black Africans that Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar with. So the delayed appearance of Othello, ‘the noble Moor’, could not have been more dramatic in reversing their initial expectations. Instead of the monster they were encouraged to pre-conceive, Shakespeare presents an articulate and rational Christian, a successful and respected General, and, in the first third of the play at least, a wholly heroic and sympathetic figure.

A drama of isolation

Having thoroughly overturned the racist slanders directed towards Othello’s character, and, by Act 2 Scene 1, having cut short the Venice versus Turkey storyline, Shakespeare begins to explore the social dynamic of what it might be like to be the only black character in an otherwise white world. Othello’s isolation is emphasised casually and continually: everyone refers to him not by his name but as ‘the Moor’, a term both de-personalising and distancing (ie not one of ‘us’), if not quite openly offensive or degrading. Shakespeare fully exploits paradoxes related to the symbolism of black and white with monochromatic religious references almost too numerous to mention, continually reminding the audience that, though deceit and jealousy may provide the motivations driving the play towards its tragic conclusion, colour is the main issue here. With tenuous ties – despite his marriage – to the Venetian aristocracy, Othello’s isolation makes him vulnerable to Iago’s duplicitous manipulation, a disguised antipathy that, with little evidence to the contrary, a modern audience might reasonably consider to be racially motivated.

Shakespeare and race

So, the question arises, why should Shakespeare be interested in exploring issues of racial isolation and victimization? One reason could be that it was something he encountered on a daily basis in the London society around him. Imtiaz Habib, in his landmark study Shakespeare and Race, concludes that Shakespeare’s London was neither wholly English nor wholly white:

We now have documented proof of the residences of black people, which must be reckoned into the colours of Shakespeare’s world, in a very literal sense. Shakespeare knew people of colour. He walked through their neighbourhoods every day.

How had these black Africans come to London? As a direct consequence, it would appear, of those early Elizabethan slavery expeditions: Habib describes how ‘adventurers’ like Hawkins, John Lok and Martin Frobisher brought some of their enslaved African cargo back to London in the 1550s, to form a small population who:

existed initially as a miscellaneous assemblage of exotic, personally possessed decorative fetishes and human curiosities…

The expulsion of the ‘blackamores’

This small population gradually grew over the following 40 years to a point where the Queen herself began to implement policies that, in modern terms, can only be described as institutionally racist. In 1596 she wrote an open letter to the Lord Mayor of London stating that:

there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are already here to manie

The letter re-produced above was written by Elizabeth, in the 1590s. Therein she promulgated the expulsion of the Moors of England from the land of their birth.

ordering that they be deported. A week later she repeated her intention ‘to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande’, commissioning a leading merchant, Casper van Senden, to ‘take up’ certain ‘blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall’. In 1601, complaining again about the ‘great numbers of Negars and Blackamoores which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm’, Elizabeth made a Royal Proclamation authorizing the deportation of ‘infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel’. Historically, these expulsion orders represent a kind of xenophobic racist state policy not seen in England since the exiling of Jews at the end of the 13th century.

We can only speculate about the reaction of black Londoners to this form of state persecution, but it isn’t too difficult to picture a vulnerable, fragmented community struggling against a climate of fear and hatred, trying hard to resist an onslaught of bigoted distortions and racial attacks. Embattled by state directives and white society’s growing hostility towards their presence, marginalised black Africans in London must have become increasingly susceptible to exploitation, manipulation and lies.

Habib suggests that Shakespeare’s relationship with black Londoners would have been close, the playwright regularly interacting with the black community while visiting friends, going to pubs and attending theatrical rehearsals and performances. More controversially, Habib believes Shakespeare may have formed a more personal, intimate relationship with a black woman living in Clerkenwell, not far from Shakespeare’s neighbourhood of Cripplegate. Habib points out that, as a sex worker, this black woman could easily have come to know Shakespeare in an area of the city where brothels and theatres flourished side by side.

Race politics and Othello

Viewed beside these intersections of black and white histories, Othello can be interpreted as a play which drew directly from experiences of race politics in Jacobean London, written by someone determined to explode race-hate myths, to represent more positive and multi-faceted images of a noble black African and to explore the consequences of explicit and implicit racist persecution on an isolated individual. However, Habib warns us against seeing Shakespeare as some kind of liberal liberator or social reformer of the theatre: his portraits of black characters remain Westernised, imagined and dramatically realised through European eyes in the language and favoured narrative form of the coloniser. In the end, the fate of his black character re-affirms cultural domination and the pattern of one culture subsuming the other. Iago’s role in this process – reducing the rational black nobleman to tortured wife-killer – remains crucial. By stimulating and controlling Othello’s jealousy – a patriarchal possessiveness that Shakespeare is careful to represent as racially non-specific, with Brabantio and Roderigo both staking claims over Desdemona – Iago propels Othello towards murder and self-destruction, effectively restoring, albeit in tragic circumstances, white supremacy within the Venetian ruling elite. Yet this is not a simple matter of theatrical ethnic cleansing. Look more carefully, Habib suggests, and you will also discover the beginnings of a turbulent, protracted conversation, a ‘difficult negotiation’ that continues into the present:

I can’t say Shakespeare reached a point of closure and an emancipated, enlightened view of people of colour

Habib concludes:

He didn’t. But he did put persons of colour into European culture, there to remain. And that enriches the cultural discourse.

A complex representation

Othello, then, draws from the race culture and politics of its day in a clear and direct manner. Written at a time when English participation in the transatlantic slave trade had been temporarily halted by Spanish market protectionism, Shakespeare fully exploits the unique cultural opportunity to develop a more complex and sympathetic representation of black experience for a predominantly white audience whose sensibilities were not yet closed to such characterizations. In the century to come, such a receptive audience would gradually disappear: as English slave traders developed their own highly profitable market in the North American colonies, enslavement of black Africans became the dominant means of economic production, and with it the full power of racist religious and political ideologies grew to exert a controlling influence over Western culture.

Richard Lees teaches English at South Hunsley School, East Yorkshire.

From emagazine 39, February 2008.

Mary McCarthy's 'General Macbeth' - part 1

Published in 1962, this is an interesting piece of lit crit from MM, essentially second-guessing the imagined thought processes of the main protagonists as updated middle-class social climbers. Having studied Macbeth a lot, I can't recall any refs to Lady Macbeth being married twice and some of the quotations seem dodgily modernized. Yet MM's argument for the text's contemporary relevance remains consistently strong, at at a time when mainstream lit crit culture was busy mining a deep hole of symbolism. MM's political perspective is considered in relation to the essay's conclusion in part 2.

Mary McCarthy's General Macbeth 

He is a general and has just won a battle; he enters the scene making a remark about the weather. 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen' [I. iii. 38]. On this flat note Macbeth's character tone is set. 'Terrible weather we're having.' 'The sun can't seem to make up its mind.' 'Is it hot/cold/wet enough for you?' A commonplace man who talks in commonplaces, a golfer, one might guess, on the Scottish fairways, Macbeth is the only Shakespeare hero who corresponds to a bourgeois type: a murderous Babbitt [in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt], let us say.

You might argue just the opposite, that Macbeth is over-imaginative, the prey of visions. It is true that he is impressionable. Banquo, when they come upon the witches, amuses himself at their expense, like a man of parts idly chaffing a fortune-teller. Macbeth, though, is deeply impressed. 'Thane of Cawdor and King.' He thinks this over aloud. 'How can I be Thane of Cawdor when the Thane of Cawdor is alive?' [cf. I. iii. 72-5] When this mental stumbling-block has been cleared away for him (the Thane of Cawdor has received a death sentence), he turns his thoughts sotto voce [under his breath] to the next question. 'How can I be King when Duncan is alive?' The answer comes back, 'Kill him' [cf. I. iii. 137-42]. It does fleetingly occur to Macbeth, as it would to most people, to leave matters alone and let destiny work it out. 'If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir' [I. iii. 143-44]. But this goes against his grain. A reflective man might wonder how fate would spin her plot, as the Virgin Mary must have wondered after the Angel Gabriel's visit. But Macbeth does not trust to fate, that is, to the unknown, the mystery of things; he trusts only to a known quantity--himself--to put the prophecy into action. In short, he has no faith, which requires imagination. He is literal-minded; that, in a word, is his tragedy.

It was not his idea, he could plead in self-defense, but the witches', that he should have the throne. They said it first. But the witches only voiced a thought that was already in his mind; after all, he was Duncan's cousin and close to the crown. And once the thought has been put into words, he is in a scrambling hurry. He cannot wait to get home to tell his wife about the promise; in his excitement, he puts it in a letter, which he sends on ahead, like a businessman briefing an associate on a piece of good news for the firm.

Lady Macbeth takes very little stock in the witches. She never pesters her husband, as most wives would, with questions about the Weird Sisters: 'What did they say, exactly?' 'How did they look?' 'Are you sure?' She is less interested in 'fate and metaphysical aid' [I. v. 29] than in the business at hand--how to nerve her husband to do what he wants to do. And later, when Macbeth announces that he is going out to consult the Weird Sisters again, she refrains from comment. As though she were keeping her opinion--'O proper stuff!' [III. iv. 59]--to herself. Lady Macbeth is not superstitious. Macbeth is. This makes her repeatedly impatient with him, for Macbeth, like many men of his sort, is an old story to his wife. A tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Her contempt for him perhaps extends even to his ambition. 'Wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win' [I. v. 21-2]. As though to say, 'All right, if that's what you want, have the courage to get it.' Lady Macbeth does not so much give the impression of coveting the crown herself as of being weary of watching Macbeth covet it. Macbeth, by the way, is her second husband, and either her first husband was a better man than he, which galls her, or he was just another general, another superstitious golfer, which would gall her too.

Superstition here is the opposite of reason on the one hand and of imagination on the other. Macbeth is credulous, in contrast to Lady Macbeth, to Banquo, and, later, to Malcolm, who sets the audience an example of the right way by mistrusting Macduff until he has submitted him to an empirical test. Believing and knowing are paired in Malcolm's mind; what he knows he believes. Macbeth's eagerness to believe is the companion of his lack of faith. If all works out right for him in this world, Macbeth says, he can take a chance on the next ('We'd jump the life to come' [I. vii. 7]). Superstition whispers when true religion has been silenced, and Macbeth becomes a ready client for the patent medicines brewed by the jeering witches on the heath.

As in his first interview with them he is too quick to act literally on a dark saying, in the second he is too easily reassured. He will not be conquered till 'great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.' 'Why, that can never happen!' [cf. IV. i. 92-4] he cries out in immediate relief, his brow clearing.

It never enters his mind to examine the saying more closely, test it, so to speak, for a double bottom, as was common in those days (Banquo even points this out to him) with prophetic utterances, which were known to be ambiguous and tricky. Any child knew that a prophecy often meant the reverse of what it seemed to say, and any man of imagination would ask himself how Birnam Wood might come to Dunsinane and take measures to prevent it, as King Laius took measures to prevent his own death by arranging to have the baby Oedipus killed [in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex]. If Macbeth had thought it out, he could have had Birnam Wood chopped down and burned on the spot and the ashes dumped into the sea. True, the prophecy might still have turned against him ..., but that would have been another story, another tragedy, the tragedy of a clever man not clever enough to circumvent fate. Macbeth is not clever; he is taken in by surfaces, by appearance. He cannot think beyond the usual course of things. 'None of woman born' [IV. i. 80]. All men, he says to himself, sagely, are born of women; Malcolm and Macduff are men; therefore I am safe. This logic leaves out of account the extraordinary: the man brought into the world by Caesarean section. In the same way, it leaves out of account the supernatural--the very forces he is trafficking with. He might be overcome by an angel or a demon, as well as by Macduff.

Yet this pedestrian general sees ghosts and imaginary daggers in the air. Lady Macbeth does not, and the tendency in her husband grates on her nerves; she is sick of his terrors and fancies. A practical woman, Lady Macbeth, more a partner than a wife, though Macbeth treats her with a trite domestic fondness--'Love,' 'Dearest love,' 'Dearest chuck,' 'Sweet remembrancer.' These middle-aged, middle-class endearments, as though he called her 'Honeybunch' or 'Sweetheart,' as well as the obligatory 'Dear,' are a master stroke of Shakespeare's and perfectly in keeping with the prosing about the weather, the heavy credulousness.

Naturally Macbeth is dominated by his wife. He is old Iron Pants in the field (as she bitterly reminds him), but at home shehas to wear the pants; she has to unsex herself. No 'chucks' or 'dearests' escape her tightened lips, and yet she is more feeling, more human finally than Macbeth. She thinks of her father when she sees the old King asleep, and this natural thought will not let her kill him. Macbeth has to do it, just as the quailing husband of any modern virago is sent down to the basement to kill a rat or drown a set of kittens. An image of her father, irrelevant to her purpose, softens this monster woman; sleepwalking, she thinks of Lady Macduff. 'The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?' [cf. IV. i. 150-53]. Stronger than Macbeth, less suggestible, she is nevertheless imaginative, where he is not. She does not see ghosts and daggers; when she sleepwalks, it is simple reality that haunts her--the crime relived. 'Yet, who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' [V. i. 39-40]. Over and over, the epiphenomena of the crime present themselves to her dormant consciousness. This nightly reliving is not penitence but more terrible--remorse, the agenbite of the restless deed. Lady Macbeth's uncontrollable imagination drives her to put herself in the place of others--the wife of the Thane of Fife--and to recognize a kinship between all human kind: the pathos of old age in Duncan has made her think, 'Why, he might be my father!' This sense of a natural bond between men opens her to contrition--sorrowing with. To ask whether, waking, she is 'sorry' for what she has done is impertinent. She lives with it and it kills her.

Macbeth has no feeling for others, except envy, a common middle-class trait. He envies the murdered Duncan his rest, which is a strange way of looking at your victim. What he suffers on his own account after the crimes is simple panic. He is never contrite or remorseful; it is not the deed but a shadow of it, Banquo's spook, that appears to him. The 'scruples' that agitate him before Duncan's murder are mere echoes of conventional opinion, of what might be said about his deed: that Duncan was his king, his cousin, and a guest under his roof. 'I have bought golden opinions,' he says to himself (note the verb), 'from all sorts of people' [I. vii. 32-3]; now these people may ask for their opinions back--a refund--if they suspect him of the murder. It is like a business firm's being reluctant to part with its 'good will.' The fact that Duncan was such a good king bothers him, and why? Because there will be universal grief at his death. But his chief 'scruple' is even simpler. 'If we should fail?' he says timidly to Lady Macbeth [I. vii. 59]. Sweet chuck tells him that they will not. Yet once she has ceased to be effectual as a partner, Dearest love is an embarrassment. He has no time for her vapors. 'Cure her of that' [V. iii. 39], he orders the doctor on hearing that she is troubled by 'fancies.' Again the general is speaking.

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-tormented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep. His invocation to sleep, while heartfelt, is perfectly conventional; sleep builds you up, enables you to start the day fresh. Thus the virtue of having a good conscience is seen by him in terms of bodily hygiene. Lady Macbeth shares these preoccupations. When he tells her he is going to see the witches, she remarks that he needs sleep.

Her wifely concern is mechanical and far from real solicitude. She is aware of Macbeth; she knows him (he does not know her at all, apparently), but she regards him coldly as a thing, a tool that must be oiled and polished. His soul-states do not interest her; her attention is narrowed on his morale, his public conduct, the shifting expressions of his face. But in a sense she is right, for there is nothing to Macbeth but fear and ambition, both of which he tries to hide, except from her. This naturally gives her a poor opinion of the inner man.

Why is it, though, that Lady Macbeth seems to us a monster while Macbeth does not? Partly because she is a woman and has 'unsexed' herself, which makes her a monster by definition. Also because the very prospect of murder quickens an hysterical excitement in her, like the discovery of some object in a shop--a set of emeralds or a sable stole--which Macbeth can give her and which will be an 'outlet' for all the repressed desires he cannot satisfy. She behaves as though Macbeth, through his weakness, will deprive her of self-realization; the unimpeded exercise of her will is the voluptuous end she seeks. That is why she makes naught of scruples, as inner brakes on her throbbing engines. Unlike Macbeth, she does not pretend to harbor a conscience, though this, on her part, by a curious turn, is a pretense, as the sleepwalking scene reveals. After the first crime, her will subsides, spent; the devil has brought her to climax and left her.

Macbeth is not a monster, like Richard III or Iago in Othelloor Iachimo [in Cymbeline], though in the catalogue he might go for one because of the blackness of his deeds. But at the outset his deeds are only the wishes and fears of the average, undistinguished man translated into halfhearted action. Pure evil is a kind of transcendence that he does not aspire to. He only wants to be king and sleep the sleep of the just, undisturbed. He could never have been a good man, even if he had not met the witches; hence we cannot see him as a devil incarnate, for the devil is a fallen angel. Macbeth does not fall; if anything, he somewhat improves as the result of his career of crime. He throws off his dependency and thus achieves the 'greatness' he mistakenly sought in the crown and scepter. He swells to vast proportions, having supped full with horrors.

The isolation of Macbeth, which is at once a punishment and a tragic dignity or honor, takes place by stages and by deliberate choice; it begins when he does not tell Lady Macbeth that he has decided to kill Banquo and reaches its peak at Dunsinane, in the final action. Up to this time, though he has cut himself off from all human contacts, he is counting on the witches as allies. When he first hears the news that Macduff is not 'of woman born' [V. viii. 12-15], he is unmanned; everything he trusted (the literal word) has betrayed him, and he screams in terror, 'I'll not fight with thee!' [V. viii. 22]. But Macduff's taunts make a hero of him; he cannot die like this, shamed. His death is his first true act of courage, though even here he has had to be pricked to it by mockery, Lady Macbeth's old spur. Nevertheless, weaned by his very crimes from a need for reassurance, nursed in a tyrant's solitude, he meets death on his own, without metaphysical aid. 'Lay on, Macduff' [V. viii. 33].

What is modern and bourgeois in Macbeth's character is his wholly social outlook. He has no feeling for others, and yet until the end he is a vicarious creature, existing in his own eyes through what others may say of him, through what they tell him or promise him. This paradox is typical of the social being--at once a wolf out for himself and a sheep. Macbeth, moreover, is an expert buck-passer; he sees how others can be used. It is he, not Lady Macbeth, who thinks of smearing the drunken chamberlains with blood (though it is she, in the end, who carries it out), so that they shall be caught 'red-handed' the next morning when Duncan's murder is discovered. At this idea he brightens; suddenly, he sees his way clear. It is the moment when at last he decides. The eternal executive, ready to fix responsibility on a subordinate, has seen the deed finally take a recognizable form. Now he can do it. And the crackerjack thought of killing the grooms afterward (dead men tell no tales--old adage) is again purely his own on-the-spot inspiration; no credit to Lady Macbeth.

It is the sort of thought that would have come to Hamlet's Uncle Claudius, another trepidant executive. Indeed, Macbeth is more like Claudius than like any other character in Shakespeare. Both are doting husbands; both rose to power by betraying their superior's trust; both are easily frightened and have difficulty saying their prayers. Macbeth's 'Amen' sticks in his throat, he complains, and Claudius, on his knees, sighs that he cannot make what priests call a 'good act of contrition.' The desire to say his prayers like any pew-holder, quite regardless of his horrible crime, is merely a longing for respectability. Macbeth 'repents' killing the grooms, but this is for public consumption. 'O, yet I do repent me of my fury, That I did kill them' [II. iii. 106-07]. In fact, it is the one deed he does not repent (i.e., doubt the wisdom of) either before or after. This hypocritical self-accusation, which is his sidelong way of announcing the embarrassing fact that he has just done away with the grooms, and his simulated grief at Duncan's murder ('All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn' [II. iii. 94-5], etc.) are his basest moments in the play, as well as his boldest; here is nearly a magnificent monster.

The dramatic effect too is one of great boldness on Shakespeare's part. Macbeth is speaking pure Shakespearean poetry, but in his mouth, since we know he is lying, it turns into facile verse, Shakespearean poetry buskined. The same with 'Here lay Duncan, His silver skin lac'd with his golden blood ...' [II. iii. 111-12]. If the image were given to Macduff, it would be uncontaminated poetry; from Macbeth it is 'proper stuff'--fustian. This opens the perilous question of sincerity in the arts: is a line of verse altered for us by the sincerity of the one who speaks it? In short, is poetry relative to the circumstances or absolute? Or, more particularly, are Macbeth's soliloquies poetry, which they sound like, or something else? Did Shakespeare intend to make Macbeth a poet, like Hamlet, Lear, and Othello? In that case, how can Macbeth be an unimaginative mediocrity? My opinion is that Macbeth's soliloquies are not poetry but rhetoric. They are tirades. That is, they do not trace any pensive motion of the soul or heart but are a volley of words discharged. Macbeth is neither thinking nor feeling aloud; he is declaiming. Like so many unfeeling men, he has a facile emotionalism, which he turns on and off. Not that his fear is insincere, but his loss of control provides him with an excuse for histrionics.

These gibberings exasperate Lady Macbeth. 'What do you mean?' [II. ii. 37] she says coldly after she has listened to a short harangue on 'Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!'" [II. ii. 32]. It is an allowable question--what does he mean? And his funeral oration on her, if she could have heard it, would have brought her back to life to protest. 'She should have died hereafter' [V. v. 17]--fine, that was the real Macbeth. But then, as if conscious of the proprieties, he at once begins on a series of bromides ('Tomorrow, and tomorrow ...' [V. v. 19ff.]) that he seems to have had ready to hand for the occasion like a black mourning suit. All Macbeth's soliloquies have that ready-to-hand, if not hand-me-down, air, which is perhaps why they are given to school children to memorize, often with the result of making them hate Shakespeare. What children resent in these soliloquies is precisely their sententiousness--the sound they have of being already memorized from a copybook....

The play between poetry and rhetoric, the conversion of poetry to declamation, is subtle and horrible in Macbeth. The sincere pent-up poet in Macbeth flashes out not in the soliloquies but when he howls at a servant. 'The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got'st thou that goose look?' [V. iii. 11]. Elsewhere, the general's tropes are the gold braid of his dress uniform or the chasing of his armor. If an explanation is needed, you might say he learned to use words through long practice in haranguing his troops, whipping them and himself into battle frenzy. Up to recent times a fighting general, like a football coach, was an orator.

But it must be noted that it is not only Macbeth who rants. Nor is it only Macbeth who talks about the weather. The play is stormy with atmosphere--the screaming and shrieking of owls, the howling of winds. Nature herself is ranting, like the witches, and Night, black Hecate, is queen of the scene. Bats are flitting about; ravens and crows are hoarse; the house-martins' nests on the battlements of Macbeth's castle give a misleading promise of peace and gentle domesticity. 'It will be rain tonight,' says Banquo simply, looking at the sky (note the difference between this and Macbeth's pompous generality), and the First Murderer growls at him, striking, 'Let it come down' [III. iii. 16]. The disorder of Nature, as so often in Shakespeare, presages and reflects the disorder of the body politic. Guilty Macbeth cannot sleep, but the night of Duncan's murder, the whole house, as if guilty too, is restless; Malcolm and Donalbain talk and laugh in their sleep; the drunken porter, roused, plays that he is gatekeeper of hell.

Indeed, the whole action takes place in a kind of hell and is pitched to the demons' shriek of hyperbole. This would appear to be a peculiar setting for a study of the commonplace. But only at first sight. The fact that an ordinary philistine like Macbeth goes on the rampage and commits a series of murders is a sign that human nature, like Nature, is capable of any mischief if left to its 'natural' self. The witches, unnatural beings, are Nature spirits, stirring their snake-filet and owl's wing, newt's eye and frog toe in a camp stew: earthy ingredients boil down to an unearthly broth. It is the same with the man Macbeth. Ordinary ambition, fear, and a kind of stupidity make a deadly combination. Macbeth, a self-made king, is not kingly, but just another Adam or Fall guy, with Eve at his elbow.

There is no play of Shakespeare's (I think) that contains the words 'Nature' and 'natural' so many times, and the 'Nature' within the same speech can mean first something good and then something evil, as though it were a pun. Nature is two-sided, double-talking, like the witches. 'Fair is foul and foul is fair,' they cry [I. i. 11], and Macbeth enters the play unconsciously echoing them, for he is never original but chock-full of the 'milk of human kindness' [I. v. 17], which does not mean kindness in the modern sense but simply human 'nature,' human kind. The play is about Nature, and its blind echo, human nature.

Macbeth, in short, shows life in the cave. Without religion, animism rules the outer world, and without faith, the human soul is beset by hobgoblins. This at any rate was Shakespeare's opinion, to which modern history, with the return of the irrational in the Fascist nightmare and its fear of new specters in the form of Communism, Socialism, etc., lends support. It is a troubling thought that bloodstained Macbeth, of all Shakespeare's characters, should seem the most 'modern,' the only one you could transpose into contemporary battle dress or a sport shirt and slacks.