Was Macbeth Ambitious?
Is Macbeth Shakespeare’s most misunderstood character?
Abstract:
According to the most common interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the character of Macbeth was driven to kill King Duncan because he was ambitious for the throne. This essay argues that Macbeth can’t really be considered ambitious since he repeatedly said that he didn’t want to kill the king; he’d never previously thought of being king, which makes the idea of him being ambitious for the throne a little far-fetched; he had no involvement in – and in fact actively objected to – the development of the plan to kill the king; and had previously been presented as a happy and loyal subject of the king, who saw the idea of killing the king as being abhorrent to his personal nature, hiss instincts as a man, and, in fact nature itself. In light of this, it seems unrealistic to imagine that Shakespeare actually wanted to present him as being someone who was driven by powerful ambition.
To explain why he did kill Duncan, the essay proposes that the witches in the play were supposed to be real witches, and that Macbeth was under the control of a magic spell when he killed Duncan. Under this interpretation, the play is actually a quite misogynistic warning against the involvement of women in decisions of power. This makes even more sense when you bear in mind that it was written to appeal to King James I, who was a noted misogynist, who believed in the corrupting power of witches.
Was Macbeth ambitious?
As an argument, there is no smoking gun here. It’s more death by a thousand cuts. Each of the following paragraphs outlines another point until, by the end, as the evidence piles up, you have a very convincing argument that he was not being presented as ambitious at all.
It’s often good to begin with something structural, as it’s always worth remembering that a writer starts out with an empty page and chooses to begin the action somewhere. Here, Shakespeare begins with Macbeth’s involvement in a battle that defends King Duncan’s kingdom against the Norwegians. (The play itself starts with the witches, but the action that first establishes the character of Macbeth is him defending Duncan’s kingdom against invaders.) Surely the only reason for starting the play here was to establish Macbeth as a loyal servant of the king. Shakespeare could have established Macbeth’s character anywhere, doing anything, and if he wanted to show that Macbeth was ambitious I imagine he would have found a better way of establishing this than showing how dedicated he was to Duncan. Surely this opening establishes him being loyal to the king, not the other way around.
During this opening section, the sergeant says that Macbeth fights while “disdaining fortune.” This means that he doesn’t seek “fortune” – suggesting riches, or reward; but it also suggests fortune-telling, or mysticism. So this line suggests that he disdains both riches and mysticism. But if we are to assume that the witches’ ‘prophecy’ led him to kill the king in pursuit of his own ambition, then we have to assume that he actually followed both. Here, you could argue that the line was simply a piece of poor characterisation, but given the fact that other, more fitting arguments are available, we don't have to accept this.
In Act 1 Scene 3, Macbeth meets the witches who ‘prophesise’ that he will be king. After he hears what the witches have to say Macbeth says that being king “stands not within the prospect of belief.” Though these could be the words of an ambitious man, saying something isn't within the scope of belief isn't very ambitious. And not long after that he says “If chance will have me crowned why then chance can crown me, without my stir.” Or in other words: “If it’s gonna happen then I guess it will, but I’m not doing anything about it.” Given the fact that this was really the Shakespearean equivalent of “meh,” I really can’t see these as being the words of an ambitious man. And remember that Macbeth had enough drive and energy to fight the Norwegians almost single-handedly, but apparently can’t be bothered to do what he secretly wants more than anything else. The whole thing just feels like a stretch.
Some people argue that his wife says he’s ambitious, though what she actually says is that he’s “not without ambition” – which is a bit like saying that the new player you’ve sent to the team “isn’t not good at football.” Lady Macbeth says that her husband is not without ambition but… he clearly doesn’t have that much – and certainly not enough to make it worthy of a Shakespearean hamartia!
One of the most famous lines quoted by those suggesting he was ambitious comes at the end of his soliloquy in A1 S7. During the speech Macbeth lists reasons why he doesn’t want to kill Duncan and ends saying that that he has no “spur to prick the sides of my intent but only vaulting ambition which doth o’erleap itself and fall on the other.” So here, at least, is an admission that ambition is his driving force. But let’s take another look at the speech:
During the soliloquy Macbeth explains three very significant reasons why he doesn’t want to kill Duncan: that evil deeds always “return to plague th’inventor;” that as the King’s “kinsman,” “subject” and “host” Macbeth should “against the murderer shut the door, and not carry the knife myself;” and that, in fact, Duncan is such an astonishing King that even the Angels would rage against his murder.
The speech goes on for almost 30 lines, of which the last three talk about his ambition – that’s 10%. Most English teachers I’ve spoken to argue that Macbeth is exploring his doubts here. However, if I spoke to a friend of mine who talked for ten minutes, and spent nine of them explaining the reasons he didn’t want to do something, and only one saying why he did, I’d probably leave wondering whether or not they really wanted to do what they were suggesting.
And let’s look at that key line in context: “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent but only vaulting ambition which doth o’erleap itself and fall on the other.”
“I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent but only…” doesn’t mean this is why I want to do it!! It means I can’t think of a single reason for doing this except… It's him trying to work out why he wants to do something that he’s previously never thought of before - it's him admitting something, which I'll come to in a minute, which is that MACBETH HAS NO MOTIVE outside "ambition," which isn't actually a motive in itself it's just you repeating the fact that you want something - but I'll come back to that.
“doth o’erleap itself and fall on the other” is a clear recognition that the thing he’s talking about will go wrong. He knows that his ambition will go too far, and then collapse. In many ways, it would seem that Macbeth's inability to do anything about problems even he can foresee is a bigger character flaw than his ambition, or lack-thereof.
But it's important to understand that in this line - so often cited by teachers as a beacon for Macbeth's ambition - he’s not saying that his ambition his motivation, he's saying that he can't think of any reason to do this thing except ambition.
Which leads me to a very important point: ambition is the desire for something, but it is NOT a reason behind the desire. This seems subtle but is actually very important. To be ambitious for something means you want it, but it’s a not a reason for wanting it. So, in this speech Macbeth lists reasons for not killing Duncan and then says that the only reason for wanting to do it is wanting it itself. This might seem satisfactory to some people, but it’s a woefully shallow character who behaves like this, and a poor playwright who tries to get away with ambition alone as a motive. If I was to write a play about Trump I'd write about his desire to be loved, his desire to be right all the time, his narcissism; if I was to write about Hitler I'd write about his desire to see the success of the Aryan race; if I was to write about Musk or Bezos or Jobs I'd write about their desire to make toys and create wonders; and yet here, we have the world's greatest playwright, creating a character whose desire to be king is just because he's ambitious for it. I pray the world is wrong about Macbeth, because if they're not then this is one of the most poorly drawn characters in the history of literature.
And the lack of motivation from Macbeth isn't limited to this scene, there's a complete lack of motivation displayed throughout the entirety of Act 1. Macbeth repeatedly gives reasons why he doesn’t want to kill Duncan, but doesn’t ever list a decent reason why he does. I’ll say that again: Macbeth doesn’t have a single soliloquy, speech… or, really, any lines in the whole play where he celebrates his ambition – even Simba got the chance to sing I just can’t wait to be king. If we’re to assume that Macbeth’s ambitious, surely Shakespeare would have given him at least one moment where he joyously rambles about the world kneeling before him, or explains some secret dream of power… but there’s nothing. Ever.
The closest he comes is the “To be thus is nothing…” speech, but that’s about the fear of losing power and not him showing any kind of desire FOR power. Macbeth certainly enjoys brutalising people at the end, but there’s no moment where he celebrates his alleged dream of power. This seems like an unusual omission from a playwright as capable as Shakespeare.
Anyway, after he delivers his “If t’were done when ’tis done…” – which outlines in poetic verse his reasons for not killing Duncan – Lady Macbeth enters, and he says: “We will proceed no further in this business.”
I’ll just repeat that: the man whose ambition is supposed to be the driving force behind this play says: “We will proceed no further in this business.” Now I don’t want to be a stickler for consent here, but if someone has expressed lengthy doubts about doing something that they’ve never said they wanted to do; and if they concluded by saying “I don’t want to do it,” we have to assume that he didn’t want to do it. Regardless of what he went on to do, the fact is that he didn’t just express doubts about killing Duncan, he clearly and concisely withdrew his consent: “We will proceed no further in this business.” And he then goes on to justify himself by talking about all the “golden opinions” he’s got, which seem to be enough for him. At this point in time, he’s happy, and his words here seem to more fairly reflect someone who is, as his wife describes: “not without ambition,” but isn’t necessarily ambitious for more.
Of course, any work of art is open to interpretation and I know that this is why a lot of people love Shakespeare, but in order to argue that Macbeth was driven by his own ambition you’d have to completely ignore quite important parts of the script: like the bit where he clearly said that he didn’t want to do it, or the bit when he listed all the reasons why he didn’t want to do it, or the bit when even his wife admits that he’s not that ambitious, or the bit when he said he was happy with what he had, or the bit when he said he might become king but he’s really not that fussed and hasn’t got any plans to do anything about it…
Which leads us to an important question, and the alternative reading: Why did he kill Duncan? (Or, more importantly: why did Shakespeare create a character who did something that he clearly didn’t want to do?)
And this is where we can engage in the real tragedy of Macbeth, which is, I think, far sadder, but has a completely different message…
So why Macbeth kill King Duncan?
The reading is simple: a) the witches’ ‘prophecy’ wasn’t a prophecy at all, it was a spell that put him under their control; and b) Lady Macbeth. The evidence is compelling:
Macbeth’s first line in the play? “So fair and foul a day I have not seen.” He actually walks on stage almost repeating what the witches have previously said. So right from the off, there’s a suggestion that he’s under their power.
The traditional reading of Macbeth, as I understand it, is that the witches’ prophecy ignited Macbeth’s already present ambition and made him pursue it. However, as I’ve already shown, Macbeth didn’t ever really show himself to be particularly ambitious and although witches’ “Hail Macbeth! Thou shalt be king hereafter…” does sound a little like a prophecy, if we look at it more as a kind of Jedi mind trick – in the spirit of “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” – then the play makes a lot more sense. These witches don’t just suggest something to him, they implant the idea into his head. It’s mind control, which was something that medieval people absolutely believed witches could do.
Immediately after hearing it, Banquo notices that Macbeth “seems to fear things which do sound so fair” – which is a clear indication that Macbeth doesn’t actually like the idea that’s just been implanted. As a character I don’t think Macbeth’s really into having power himself – hence his relationship with a borderline dominatrix. Really, Macbeth’s happiest when someone is telling him what to do and so I think the idea of becoming powerful would actually have been quite traumatic for him.
And it’s worth mentioning something here that I’ll come back to later: Shakespeare didn’t have the chance to write prose where he described a character’s response to things, so he often put those descriptions in other character’s mouths. Banquo’s line here makes it clear that Macbeth feels “fear” at the witches’ prophecy; he’s not excited, he’s afraid of the idea. There’s also a repeated use of the word “rapt” when talking about Macbeth’s reaction to the witches. These days that has more positive connotations, but the archaic meaning of the word just meant being transported on a kind of spiritual journey – or being absorbed by something religious or ethereal. At this point, I’d argue, Shakespeare is describing someone who’s being absorbed by the witches’ spell.
Anyway, not long after the witches leave, Macbeth delivers an aside in which he describes the feelings they’ve left him with. He wonders whether they are good or ill. “If good,” he says, “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.” There’s a lot in this line – which I’d argue is the most important line in the play:
First off: “why do I yield to that suggestion”: in other words, why am I giving in to something that someone else has told me. Clearly he is giving in to someone else’s idea, and not awakening his own ambition at all. In short: a “suggestion” that you “yield” to can only have come from someone else.
It does “unfix my hair” and make “my seated heart knock at my ribs”: Obviously he doesn’t like this idea! His hair stands on end, and his heart, which was previously settled and seated as a vassal to the king, is now knocking at his ribs; anxiety, panic, fear, however you want to pin it down, it seems clear that he is not happy with what has been suggested.
Because, for Macbeth, the idea that he should kill the king is “against the use of nature.” It is against the natural order, and it is against his own nature. After all, he’s only “not without ambition” and, for him, actually being king “stands not within the prospect of belief.”
So it would seem that the idea of doing this thing – which has never been mentioned at this point – is not something Macbeth has ever thought of previously or likes very much. In fact – much to the witches’ ire – the idea “shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered.” Or in other words, the idea of killing the king is so abhorrent to him that he doesn’t believe he can act on it – this is a key line when looking at the fact that Macbeth didn’t just object to killing the king, he thought the idea of it shook his “state of man” – his masculinity – so violently that he wouldn’t be able to act on it.
This presents a problem for the witches. But that’s ok, because they have an insider…
Before we meet their mole, however, Macbeth is told that Malcolm will be Duncan’s successor. This scene contains another key moment for those who would condemn Macbeth as a willing usurper, though countering it requires a more granular analysis:
Upon hearing the news that Malcolm will be Duncan’s successor, Macbeth says: “there’s a step on which I must fall down or else o’erleap.” This line could be delivered with a villainous cackle as he readies himself for one more murder, or it could be delivered with a bemused laugh as though to say “good luck with that one witches!” The next line finishes the previous sentence as he acknowledges that “in my way it lies. Stars hide your fires…” I’d argue that there’s a change of tone on this line. Macbeth doesn’t want to murder Duncan, but has found himself possessed, literally, by the desire. He follows this realisation with a kind of painful plea to the heavens: “Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires.” And again, we get a clear expression of Macbeth’s recognition that what he’s doing is wrong. He’s terrified that anything symbolised by the stars and their wrathful fires would ever see the idea that grows inside him. “Let not light (God) see my black and deep desires.” He knows that his desires are black and evil, and deep – almost living only in his subconscious, where the witches’ spell has taken root. I think of the idea itself as being implanted, like the foetus in Alien; it lives inside him now, and it eats him up, and he’s terrified of it. This is his tragedy: the insipid way that the witches’ wishes have been allowed to take root in his loyal, masculine mind.
And so he does what any doting husband would do, and writes to his wife…
A1 S5 is a perfect pantomime of villainy. Throughout her opening speech Lady Macbeth absolutely crucifies the idea that Macbeth wears anything even resembling trousers in their relationship: he’s too full of “kindness,” he won’t “play false,” he wants things “holily”… he’s simply not prepared to make the hard decisions. I find it staggering that anyone could read this speech and argue that Macbeth’s ambition, or lack-there-of, had any influence on what eventually happened. Lady Macbeth is presented as the one who runs that show. She doesn’t care what he wants; she’ll pour her spirits in his ear and he’ll do what she bloody well says.
And then, if there was any doubt as to her position in the play, she pulls out all the stops and confirms the worst: she’s a witch, or at least in league with them – and it is through her that the witches are able to remove whatever horror had previously threatened to “smother” Macbeth’s “function.”
Shakespeare clarifies the power dynamic in the Macbeth’s relationship when they first meet: Lady Macbeth greets him with a list of titles – “Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor…” etc. – while Macbeth simply says “My dearest love.” For me, this tells us all we need to know about their relationship, and the extent to which their intentions are not aligned: he loves her, but she sees him as a meal ticket. This is not the only time in the play when he calls her his “dearest” love (he actually refers to her as “dear” or “dearest” five times.) This is telling because although something that is “dear” is cherished and loved, it is also something expensive, and her love of his titles certainly ends up being expensive for Macbeth.
There’s also a lovely but overlooked bit of evidence for the Lady Macbeth being a witch that’s hidden in her greeting: when the witches speak to Macbeth they say “All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!” But when he writes to his wife, he misquotes them and has them claiming they said “‘Hail, king that shalt be!’” But when Lady Macbeth greets him in scene 5, she says “Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!” Which means that Lady Macbeth paraphrases the witches, despite Macbeth getting their quote wrong. For someone like Shakespeare, this has to have been deliberate.
The rest of the scene plays out simply: she asks when Duncan’s coming, he says tonight; she asks when he goes, he says tomorrow; and then she suddenly blurts out this thing about killing him! As a speech this should really be complemented with her rubbing her hands and cackling maniacally, ideally dressed as some kind of Disney-witch, while Macbeth watches on horror-struck. It’s like his worst nightmare come true: these whacky witches have implanted a thought and now his wife’s getting in on the act.
Because there’s a really important point to be made here: Macbeth never told his wife that he wanted to kill Duncan. All he said in his letter was that some witches told him he was going to become king, something that could have come about as a result of the any one of a million different things – this was 11th Century Scotland after all – but Lady Macbeth jumps straight on the regicide bandwagon. And most tellingly of all, she immediately attacks Macbeth’s response to the idea:
You see, as I said before, without the chance for narrative description Shakespeare often uses other characters to reveal responses. Here, she suggests killing Duncan and then immediately attacks his guilty face – because, obviously, he didn’t look like he liked the idea. Here, Lady Macbeth says that his “face is a book where men may read many strange matters,” which is, in many ways, a description of how Macbeth has responded to the idea – with a face of horror, confusion, or, more probably, fearful guilt.
She continues to explain her plan, but he’s too kowtowed to object, and in the end he only has the strength to say: “We’ll talk later” – and you could deliver this line any one of a million different ways, but for this reading it lends itself to a kind of panicked attempt to buy a little time; or a slightly fearful attempt to end the conversation, depending on how abused you want Macbeth to appear. Crucially though, Lady Macbeth ends the scene telling him to stay calm and “leave all the rest to me.”
In summary: Macbeth didn’t ever say he wanted to kill the king. Lady Macbeth had the idea, and told him, in as many words: leave it all to me. All of which supports the initial statement in the essay: I don’t understand how this plan has anything to do with Macbeth’s ambition?
The next time we see Macbeth he’s explaining, at length, his reasons for not wanting to kill the king, which has been covered already – the poisoned cup always kills the poisoner; he and Duncan are friends and family; even Angels would complain, etc… Then Lady Macbeth enters and he says that they will “proceed no further in this business.” At this point, I can see her face fall stony cold; one of those faces that says: “Are you sure you want to do this?” Macbeth nervously continues and offers her the one thing she seems to want by talking about his titles and “golden opinions,” but she won’t have it and instead she steamrollers him.
First of all she hits him with a string of questions – classic henpecking-wife motif – only stopping briefly to remind him that if he doesn’t do this she’ll assume he doesn’t love her – classic abusive behaviour: the abuser lies down and plays victim unless they get what they want.
At one point, she even asks what beast it was that promised to kill Duncan in the first place! But he didn’t ever say he wanted to kill the king! It was all her idea! This moment always reminds me of lessons when kids come in and ask if we’re watching a film. I say no. They say I promised! I say, I didn’t. They insist. I don’t fall for it. Claiming someone said something they didn’t say and then using that as leverage is classic gaslighting. You’re basically messing with someone’s ability to use memory as a reliable point of reference. Before Macbeth can object though, she kicks him where she knows it hurts and attacks his manhood.
I’ve always thought that if you’re going to play Macbeth right you’d need someone like The Rock or that guy from Guardians of the Galaxy who’s tough as nuts but as thick as pea soup. Macbeth’s a meathead; he’s a jock; an alpha male with all the emotional resilience of an autumn leaf. Based on his responses in this scene I can completely understand why his wife thinks he’s such a muppet. You’d need him to be big, to get away with all the knave-to-chaps cleaving he did earlier on, but he can’t be clever – my favourite Macbeth was always Sean Connery who really nailed the nice but dim delivery. Lady Macbeth’s persuasive techniques have all the subtlety of a club round the head, and he only has four lines before he changes his mind. He’s like putty in her hands, and I find it hard to see how he could go from the reflective poet who talked about trumpet-tongued angels and heaven’s cherubim just moments before, and into this troglodyte who grunts about manliness and then agrees to murdering his friend.
I sometimes reflect on the fact that Shakespeare was stuck in a bit of a bind with his characters simply because his brand was all about verbal dexterity, and that makes it difficult for him to write stupid people – even his thugs speak in verse. As a result, I find Macbeth’s pathetic attempts to defend himself here a little jarring, but maybe this just adds to his real tragedy: he was a poet, a sensitive soul, who really only wanted to chop people’s heads off for the king, but his wife never appreciated that…
Anyway, in the end – and it didn’t take much – she talks him around.
It’s also worth picking up on a common modern misunderstanding of masculinity at the time. I’ve heard English teachers talk about how Lady Macbeth was rebelling against her feminine chains by being ambitious for power but this really doesn’t cover the whole story. Firstly, it’s is a stone-cold fact that if you wanted to enter the Royal family in Jacobean England you had a better chance as a woman and being married into it, than as a man and… doing what? There really was no way to be Royal as a man. Lady Macbeth’s desire for advancement was abhorrent for women and men. Ambition simply wasn’t viewed in the same way back then. You carried on your family line and that was what was expected of you. As a man you could advance, you could raise the profile of your name, but there were very strict rules around what you could and couldn’t do, and defending their honour was something that Jacobean men would have taken to the grave. This play is really about a man struggling to remain loyal to the expectations of his masculinity while giving his demanding wife what she expects.
While we’re looking at Macbeth as a henpecked husband though, it’s worth looking at the last thing his wife says before he changes his mind: the whole baby killing business. Obviously, this has led to all the discussion over whether or not they had children before, though I see something different:
In A1 S5 Lady Macbeth says that she wanted to “chastise” Macbeth – the actions of a parent; after killing the king, she tries to get him to wash his hands; she tells him off for bringing the daggers with him; she tells him that it’s “the eye of childhood that fears the painted devil.” After he sees the ghost she compares it to the “air drawn dagger” he saw, in a way that reminds me of a mother scolding her child after hearing too many tales of some monster under the bed. And in my favourite moment, Macbeth tells her, after he’s planned to kill Banquo, that she should know nothing of it until she “applaud the deed.” I imagine some strange toddler version Macbeth sitting on the potty while his beaming mother claps and smiles at his ability to do just what she’s taught him; because, after all, at this point – when he’s ordering the death of Banquo – he is really only doing exactly what she taught him to. He is hers now; owned, signed, sealed, delivered.
Based on the above interpretation of their relationship being oedipal, it’s reasonable to suggest that the reason Macbeth was so disturbed by the image of his wife smashing their child’s head against a wall had nothing to do with any theoretic child, but everything to do with the idea that Macbeth was the child. Lady Macbeth killing their child was a veiled threat of violence against Macbeth himself.
Because the truth is that although Macbeth is physically a man, and the play explores cultural masculinity, the character himself was very much a child before his wife. She has all the power – it’s her plan after all. She dominates him, and although it seems obvious at this point to see his hamartia as being the influence of his wife I’d argue that the truth is broader and more insidious than that.
Because behind Lady Macbeth are the witches, who are, arguably, the real Joker-esque, anarchic villains of the piece.
As far as I can tell, the common understanding is that the witches aren’t actually active in the play but merely trigger Macbeth’s own ambition. I find this a weak argument. After all, why would Shakespeare write a play with witches if they weren’t capable of any real magic? This was a world where witches were considered genuinely magical creatures, and yet most common readings suggest that Shakespeare’s witches had no real power whatsoever – they merely ignited Macbeth’s own ambition.
But there’s one piece of evidence that leaves me unable to leave the witches side-lined and it lies in the story of the sailor’s wife with the chestnuts.
Act 1 Scene 3 opens with a story that’s largely viewed as being a filler, in which one witch – I don’t know which – talks about having cast a spell on a sailor’s wife. But the spell is quite specific: she will “drain him dry as hay and sleep shall neither night nor day hang upon his penthouse lid.” She will take away his ability to sleep. Surely a playwright as interested in details as Shakespeare was wouldn’t have had a spell like that mentioned at the beginning of the play, and then include constant references to an inability to sleep throughout it, if he wasn’t alluding to the fact that the witches have directly caused all this. Also, the “drain him dry as hay” reference is commonly seen as sexual, but what if it just refers to the same kind of psychological torment that Macbeth endures during the rest of the play? They will psychologically torment the sailor and take away his ability to heal himself with the “balm of hurt minds.” In short, here, they’re basically just telling the audience what they’re about to do to Macbeth.
Also, just after he kills Duncan, Macbeth says he thought he “heard a voice cry ‘sleep no more. Macbeth does murder sleep.’” Surely this is an actual voice: the voice of the witches, that carries on the wind, as they cast their evil spells and control him.
And so it’s not his guilt that affects his sleep, it’s a spell. It’s a spell cast by the witches – the witches who controlled his actions and made him murder Duncan. This is a play that warns the audience about the insidious threat posed by the overt and subversive influence of women – a threat that will turn the natural order itself upside-down.
In fact, though it’s almost never performed as a part of the play, that speech in Act 1 Scene 3 is really just one long Chekov’s Gun, in which the witches establish what they have the power to do to men, before going on and doing it to Macbeth:
In that speech they say: “I will drain him dry as hay: / Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his pent-house lid;” which they do to Macbeth when they stop him from sleeping. They say: “He shall live a man forbid:” and Macbeth spends the rest of the play being denied what he wants. “Weary se'nnights nine times nine / Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:” though the actual length of Macbeth’s sufferance is never determined, he definitely spends the rest of the play veering between dwindling, peaking and pining; and they end saying “Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tost.” Which is a near perfect description of the position of Macbeth by the end. I honestly cannot understand why any director even remotely worth their salt would remove this speech.
Another interesting moment comes in A2 S1, just before Macbeth does the deed. He’s getting ready for bed and tells Banquo that he doesn’t think of the witches much. I’ve heard it suggested that this is Macbeth lying to his friend, and although I could also imagine that he’s been slightly side-tracked by his wife, I’d suggest that the real reason Macbeth can’t talk to Banquo about what he’s going is because a) Fleance is there, and it’s not kid’s talk; and b) the only way he can do this now is to mention Lady Macbeth’s psychotic ambition, and like any victim of an abusive relationship, breaking the private prison is difficult. He does, however, say that he wants to speak to Banquo; he says that he wants to share; he tries to step outside the feminine trap he’s in and speak to his male friend. But this is a threat to the witches and so they send a magic dagger – the phallic symbol of the masculinity he so desires – to give him a nudge in the right direction.
Now again, I’ve heard said that this actually is a product of Macbeth’s “heat oppressed brain,” but really? This is a play with witches, real witches, and it would make far more sense if this was just an example of a piece of magic that pushes him into the deed. Macbeth’s been harried and hassled by women throughout the play: the witches’ planted the idea inside his mind, his wife poured her spirits into him, and now there’s magic daggers… the guy didn’t stand a chance! “O’er the one-half world nature seems dead.” This is him crossing into the witches’ world – his nature (once “too full o’ the milk of human kindness”) is dying. He sees it happening, but like an abused husband or the victim of a possession, there is nothing he can do about it.
The witches having greater influence over the action also helps explain one of my other big bug-bears about this play: the sudden change and death of Lady Macbeth.
In A3 S5 Hecate arrives, in a scene that CliffsNotes describes as being “unnecessary to the understanding of Macbeth,” a feeling that’s generally mirrored in how often it’s ignored by productions – apparently it wasn’t even written by the Bard. In the scene, Hecate drags the witches over the coals for taking on this whole thing alone. She argues that Macbeth is basically unworthy of their attention and suggests making him feel secure, arguing that “security is mortal’s chiefest enemy.”
Now, I can sort of understand what CliffNotes is saying, except for the impact the scene could have had on Lady Macbeth’s narrative (I’ll admit that this one is a stretch, but here goes):
Lady Macbeth isn’t actually on stage much during the second half of the play. Her final two scenes are the banquet scene and her sleepwalking moment. In the banquet scene she’s fine; she’s Lady Macbeth – chastising her husband for being a baby, sending home all his friends because he went weird, and generally being the most competent person in the room. Then she disappears for the whole of Act 4. Then she reappears, mad, and kills herself. By any standards this is a significant turn of events, but for some reason Shakespeare decides not to engage with it. It just happens. A massive personality overhaul just happens, entirely off-stage. Her story is basically: dominant, dominant, dominant, dominant, dominant, mad, dead. Admittedly, in A3 S2 she expressed some self-doubt, during her “nought’s had, all’s spent” speech, but since this is only a quatrain it seems a stretch to take this as being self-doubt enough for suicide. Either this is the Shakespearean cannon’s biggest overlooked character flip, or something else happened… and maybe the Hecate scene explains it.
Because Lady Macbeth has to be seen as a witch. The idea that her witchy nature is only suggested seems wrong given the fact that her opening scene – in a play where witches are major characters – has her calling “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts…” etc. The fact that her opening scene has her performing an occult rite can’t be ignored. Her character is established doing witchy things, and then she aids and abets the desires of the actual witches, and this cannot be ignored. Nor, I think, can the fact that she paraphrased the witches after Macbeth misquoted them – this is just another pointer to the fact that Lady M is definitely with the D.
When you apply this, you can follow that after Hecate withdraws her support, when Hecate calls for the saga to be drawn to a head, Lady Macbeth is deserted and then goes mad. One of the things she asks the spirits for in A1 S5 is that they “block up the passage to remorse,” so she won’t feel guilty. So she asked the spirits to stop her from feeling guilty, and then, when Hecate withdraws her support, she’s suddenly consumed by a guilt that she’s never expressed before. That seems to be a reasonable narrative arc, and without it, her suicide is… well, to say it came out of the blue is an understatement.
Bearing in mind the idea that the evil characters withdrawing their support may have actually caused Lady Macbeth’s death, it’s also worth noting that the news of her final demise is delivered by Satan himself… or, sorry – Seyton… Satan… Seyton…
PlayShakespeare.com suggests that the fact their names rhyme may be “coincidence” but I mean… really? As a playwright Shakespeare has been analysed more than any other writer of all time, nothing the man did is considered accidental, and yet two characters called Satan and Seyton, who would have first appeared in a play which featured witchcraft as a major theme and was written to be performed without a script to note the difference in spelling… I mean… I have no understanding of how that can be considered coincidence. If anyone can enlighten me, I’d really appreciate it.
Either way, in the end Macbeth is killed and the play closes, leaving the audience discussing where and why it all went wrong for Macbeth. What would they have said? What was Macbeth’s hamartia? What was the thing that they learnt from watching this tragic story unfold?
Well, who was Macbeth, according to this reading? He was a good man, loyal to the king, rewarded and celebrated. However, he was a child before his wife, and he couldn’t resist the spell of the witches. Basically, he couldn’t stand up to the women in his life. He loved his wife desperately, but she only wanted power and he was left pandering to her psychotic desires. In short: his love for women left him vulnerable to the evil that resides within the women in the play. This is a play that warns us about what happens when good men are bossed around by women. If that happens, the natural order itself will collapse.
Really, I’d argue that this is the most misogynist play in a cannon that also includes The Taming of the Shrew, which is saying something.
And there’s one final piece of analysis that puts the nail in the misogynist coffin for me:
In the play, women try to take control and the world collapses. Women should not meddle in matters of power; those who try are basically Satanists or abusers, and the men who listen to them bring doom upon themselves and all around them.
But… the same is not true the other way. Because the real hero of the play is Macduff, who kills Macbeth. Macduff is the perfect man: he chooses his King over his wife; his loyalty to the masculine chain of command is never broken; he is not like Macbeth. When he discovers that his children are killed, he is encouraged to “dispute it like a man.” He will, he says, but first he must “feel it as a man.” At this moment he transcends gender by being both loyal and emotional. He felt the pain of the loss of his family, but he stood by the natural order anyway – he stood by his King over his wife; which is exactly what Macbeth didn’t do.
At this point, it is as though Macduff has transcended the gender divide to become both a feared killer and to feel the emotions that were regarded as being the preserve of the feminine. And he can do this for one reason: he can do it because, as a character, he is the furthest person from womanhood – he is the ideal dream of the misogynist: He can do it because he was not even “of woman born.”
Context:
This reading isn’t an attack against Shakespeare’s actual vision of women, or his personal feelings – and I fully accept that he has written some fantastic female parts – but this reading does take into account the fact that Shakespeare was a master people-pleaser, king of the blockbuster, and this play was very clearly written with a particular end: to impress King James, who was a notable misogynist – just ask Agnes Sampson. (I think there’s also a case for saying that Shakespeare didn’t like this play much. He did, after all, call it a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound a fury and signifying nothing.”)
Shakespeare wanted King James to support his theatre company, and James wanted a play about three specific things: witchcraft, misogyny and reasons not to commit treason. Shakespeare provided all three, with bells and whistles. The most notable whistle being the wonderful unresolved plot line of how Banquo’s children would ascend to the throne – I’ve never taught a class where someone didn’t pick up on this missing link. You explain that the reason wasn’t even in the play at all, but the rumour that James was a direct descendent of Banquo’s. One kid even picked up on a lovely image from A4 S1 where the line of kings walk forward, with the last holding a glass that might have been a looking glass, that was maybe once held up to James’ face to remind the room of his noble rights over the throne – or for the plebs, in The Globe, perhaps it was a picture of the man himself.
It’s also worth contextualising some of the reasons behind James’s misogyny: to start with I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to claim that a Jacobean audience would have been wildly surprised by a powerful female lead like Lady Macbeth given that they’d just had 45 years of Queen Elizabeth – a brutal, ruthless ruler who had no problems killing people who went against her. On top of that, Elizabeth only ascended to the throne after killing her sister Mary, James’s mother, in what threatened to become a quite bloody conflict. In fact, powerful women had been around for some time – and most of that time was bloody and violent. So I don’t think it is fair to say that Lady Macbeth’s blood-thirsty, ambitious ruthlessness would have come as a surprise to anyone.
But for me, the most powerful influencer of James’s psyche was the story of Anne Boleyn. Anne was from a noble family but it wasn’t an important one. Henry, at the time, was a famed warrior and a good King. Anne allegedly seduced Henry and as a result he started the reformation that tore the kingdom apart and plunged England into fifty years of conflict. The conflict wasn’t really resolved until James took the throne in 1504.
So, Henry and Anne’s story is one of a seemingly good man – a strong warrior – who was tempted and changed by a seductress who then brought ruin on the kingdom. And guess what? Before she was beheaded, Anne Boleyn was accused of being a witch. I simply cannot believe that the story of Anne wasn’t the main driver of the character of Lady Macbeth.
I can’t imagine James being more satisfied with a play than he would have been with Macbeth: it’s set in Scotland; it gives authority to his claims over the throne; it encourages us to remain in our stations and not challenge the natural order in the way Guy Fawkes had done; and it reminds us, most of all, to fear the women who, he thought, had brought so much ruin onto England.
It is a piece of brilliant piece of propaganda, written by a master of the art, that helped an ambitious playwright earn a fortune from a misogynist royal.
But it is definitely NOT a play about Macbeth’s ambition…