Macbeth

I’ve embarked on a new multi-year project: reading Shakespeare. Over the coming years, I plan to tackle all his 39 plays. I began with Macbeth and it wasn’t too hard to discern why he’s claimed to be the deepest thinker the human race has ever produced.

If you’re daunted by the language of Shakespeare, I recommend picking up the No Fear Shakespeare series. The books have the original text on one side and the line-by-line translation in simple modern English on the other, making his works accessible. After that, Harold Bloom’s ‘Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human’ and selected YouTube lectures on the plays are good enough for getting a grasp on the characters and the deeper interpretations.

Now, about Macbeth. Upon Queen Elizabeth’s death, King James I of Scotland ascended the English throne, and Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606 to honor him. The historical Macbeth was a real-life Scottish ruler from the 11th century, and the play set in a pagan world, bordered by the Norwegians and the Irish, serves as a liminal space between barbarism and Christianity. Unlike most tyrants, Macbeth’s descent into tyranny is marked by guilt, remorse, and fear—distinctly ‘Christian’ values that make him an unusual figure of villainy. Shakespeare takes us on a journey into Macbeth’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and what we get to see is the violence that probably all of us too are so capable of inflicting on others. All it takes is a Lady Macbeth in our life or an object of desire to bring us down.

Lady Macbeth and her cold, calculated plans to make Macbeth the ruler of Scotland has some of the best lines of the play. As she steels herself to remain unwavering in their plan;

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! Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!

On hearing the news of her death, Macbeth utters Shakespeare’s greatest lines pondering the absurdity of life and the relentless march of time:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Check out Patrick Stewart deliver these lines and see how the emphasis on select words transforms their impact entirely…

For Harold Bloom, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth shared one of the ‘happiest’ marriages in all of Shakespeare—twisted as they were, they remained bound by their shared descent into destruction. The complex sexual dynamic between them is also hard to miss in the play. Lady Macbeth had nurtured and suckled a baby once. Her chilling words about having no compunction to murder such a child:

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 plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

Was Macbeth impotent and incapable of fathering a child? Is the dream of the throne the driver of their eroticism? The critic Julie Barmazel suggests that the Macbeths’ are ultimately a “masturbatory reign,” driven solely by the couple’s selfish, political desires, with no concern for the future of the nation. In an amusing piece, she explores how the specter of orgasm recurs throughout the play, culminating in Macbeth’s death:

The term “come” appears in Macbeth’s speeches and in speeches relating to him with a noticeable regularity: “Macbeth doth come” (1.3.29); “Come what come may” (1.3.145); “our thane is coming” (1.5.32); “Come, let me clutch thee,” he says to the vision of the dagger (2.1.34); and “To bed, to bed; . . . Come, come, come, come, give me your hand . . . to bed, to bed, to bed” (5.1.56–58) his wife says to him in her reverie. The witches sing “Come away, come away” (3.5) after discussing the fact that Macbeth, perhaps a man whom they have already decided to “drain . . . as dry as hay” (1.3.17) and who “loves for his own ends” (3.5.13), will “come to know his destiny” (3.5.17). A common enough word, but it appears almost too often in Macbeth. Perhaps this is because the doomed king has already “come” too much—but to no good end—or because he will never come into his own, as it were. Perhaps the witches are implying that Macbeth must “come” in order to fulfill his destiny, while Lady Macbeth urges him to do what she knows all too well he cannot.

I wonder what Shakespeare would have made of all these interpretations. But if you’re curious, the best lecture on Macbeth I came across is the five-hour long, three-part series by the late Prof. Paul Cantor, available on YouTube. It’s a deep dive into the political world of Macbeth. Utterly fascinating.

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