The Play in 1606 | The Witches | The Supernatural | The Symbolic pattern

An Introduction to Macbeth
By D. R. Elloway

Macbeth was one of the most topical of Shakespeare’s plays when it was first produced. It was written in first half of I606, shortly after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, when — like Scotland after the murder of Duncan — the country was still shaken by the ‘fears and scruples’ aroused by this nearly successful attempt to murder the King, his heirs, and most of the nobility. Ross’s description of the troubled state of Scotland

must have reflected the perturbation in England at the end of I605.

It is the echoes of the Plot that fix the date of the play with greatest certainty. The medallion struck to commemorate its discovery is recalled in one of Lady Macbeth’s speeches (see I. 5.64-5), and there can be little doubt that the Porter’s references to equivocation allude to the trial on 28 March of Henry Garnet, Provincial of the English Jesuits, for complicity in the Plot. Garnet had persistently denied any knowledge of it, and when he was finally compelled to admit his guilt he excused his previous false denials as ‘equivocation’, maintaining that this was justifiable, and might even be confirmed by oath and sacrament, in a righteous cause. Perjury was not perjury if, as the Porter puts it, it was ‘for God’s sake’. Equivocation became the fashionable topic of the day, the subject for serious treatises and grim jokes. When the Porter comments that his equivocator ‘could not equivocate to heaven’ he is echoing the sardonic remarks current at the time such as Dudley Carleton’s prediction that Garnet would ‘be hanged without equivocation’, or Garnet’s own words on the scaffold — ‘It is no time now to equivocate’.

Moreover, as Dr Leslie Hotson’ has pointed out, two of the Conspirators, Catesby and Winters, were natives of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire, and one of the centres of the Plot was Clopton House, near-Stratford. Sir Everard Digby had collected a party of Catholic gentry there to seize the Princess Elizabeth, and the other conspirators fled there after the arrest of Fawkes, and were nearly captured by the bailiff of Stratford. In London they seem to have frequented the Mermaid tavern, traditionally the social centre for Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists; Ben Jonson dined there with Catesby a few days before the Plot was discovered. Shakespeare may thus have had a personal interest in the conspiracy, although there is no evidence that he was acquainted with any of the conspirators.

Even without this, however, he must have been powerfully affected by the discovery of the holocaust that they had planned — ‘their diabolicall Domesday’, as .James I called it. Macduff describes the murder of Duncan in the same terms when he likens it to ‘the great doom’s image’, and his horrified outburst was not merely conventional exaggeration. Regicide was regarded with peculiar horror at the time. The King was God’s regent on earth, the ‘Lord’s anointed temple’ (II.3. 67) in which divinity resided. The sanctity of kingship and the piety of a true king are constantly stressed in the play (see III. 6. 27, 45 - 7, IY. 3. I08–II, I40 - 59, 238 - 9j V. 9. 38). Thus the murder of the king was not only treason, but sacrilege. It was the supreme violation of the moral order of the universe that had been ordained by God, and was evident throughout His creation. The ordered hierarchy of social ranks in the state was seen as a reflection of the universal hierarchy of being that ascended from inanimate matter through vegetable and animal life to man, and thence through the spititual orders God, at its apex. As the universe was sustained by God, so the well-being of the kingdom depended on the person of the king. An active ‘correspondence’ was thought to exist between these two orders: disturbances in the heavens foretold disorders in the state, and disorder in the political realm produced similar convulsions in the natural. When Duncan is murdered, the sun - the monarch of the heavens - is darkened, the kingly falcon is killed by a mousing owl, and Duncan’s horses make war against their natural superior, man-

A similar correspondence was thought to exist between the human constitution and that of the state. Man was a ‘little kingdom in which the hierarchy of the faculties resembled that of the different ranks in society: reason ruled over the will, which in turn controlled the appetites and esires. Physical and psychological health depended on the preservation of this order, and both would be disturbed if a particular desire was allowed to become too powerful and to rebel against the dictates of reason. Disease in the body and mind corresponded to insurrection in the kingdom, and because of the close relationship; between this psychological order and that of society the health of the kingdom depended on the moral health of its monarch. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth allow their desire for the throne to overcome their rational and spiritual insight, and the consequent disorder in their personalities is reflected in the chaotic state of Scotland. Both the tyrant and his realm are diseased; Macbeth wishes that die Doctor who is attending Lady Macbeth could ‘cast the water’ of his land,

But he himself the disease that must be purged by the blood of the loyal thanes (V. 2. 28~9, and see also IV. 3. 2I4-15). Conversely, the true heir to the throne is ‘the medicine of the sickly weal’ (V. 2, 27). The clearest evidence of the spiritual authority of kingship was the miraculous healing power of the king, which was still believed in literally. As late as the eighteenth century it was thought that he could cure scrofula - the ‘king’s evil’- by touching those afflicted with it, a power that was supposed to have been bestowed on the saintly Edward the Confessor and passed on to his royal descendants (see IV. 3. 140-59)

The necessity for order in the kingdom was a common theme for Shakespeare, but in no other play - not even in Richard II does he uphold the divine authority of the king as unequivocally as he does in Macbeth. This would have been very gratifying to James I. Coming from Scotland, he was anxious to demonstrate 4is right to the English throne; and it was to show that he was the legitimate king that he resumed the practice of touching for scrofula, although his Calvinist upbringing inclined him to regard it as a relic of Catholic superstition. Thus he would have appreciated Shakespeare’s account of the ceremony at the English court; indeed, the whole of that scene would have appealed to him, with its catalogue of the vices of tyranny and the corresponding ‘king-becoming graces’. He fancied himself as a ‘philosopher king’, and in his Basilikon Doron (I599) had compiled a similar list of royal virtues for the instruction of his eldest son, contrasting them with the tyranny of a usurper, who - like Macbeth - lives in continual fear and is lawfully killed by his own subjects. Shakespeare certainly aimed to please James with Macbeth, and one of its first performances was probably at Hampton Court in August, I806, to entertain the King and his brother-in-law, Christian IV of Denmark. The play may have been written especially for this state visit.

The prominence of the witches in the play would been equally appropriate for this occasion, as it was when he was returning from Denmark after his marriage to Christian’s sister, Anne, that James had first come in. contact with witchcraft. A coven of witches in North Berwickshire had tried to practise the black arts against him, and the confession of one of them, Agnes Seaton, was published in a pamphlet entitled News from Scotland in I59I. She had first hung up a toad ‘by the heels’ and caught the venom that dropped from it (compare IV. I. ~8) so that she could use it to anoint an article of clothing that the King had worn. Being unable to obtain any of his soiled linen, she and her colleagues had christened a cat, tied to it parts of the body of a dead man (compare IV.I. 6-8) and carried it out to sea before the town of Leith, ‘sailing in their riddles or sieves’ (compare I. 3. 8). The storm that they raised by this means hindered the King return and wrecked a ship carrying gifts for the new Queen. James at first doubted this story, but agreed that the winds had been strangely contrary to his own ship, and he was finally convinced when Agnes Seaton told him the very words that had passed between him and Anne on their wedding night. The subject fascinated him: ‘In respect of the strangeness of these matters’ he ‘took great delight to be present at their examinations’, and he was doubtless gratified by their explanation of the devil’s special hatred for him - ‘by reason the King is the greatest enemy he hath in the world’. His interest led him to write a treatise on witchcraft, Demonology (I597, published in England I603).

James’s initial scepticism was not so uncommon at the time; the best known account of the beliefs current about witches — Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (I584) was written to expose them as superstitions. But most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have had no doubts about their truth. Murder by witchcraft had been punishable by death since 1563, and a new act in 1604 made any practice of it a capital offence. Whatever his private opinions, Shakespeare certainly accepted the reality of witches for the purpose of his play.

Some doubts about the nature of the witches in Macbeth have been aroused by the fact that they are called the ‘Weird Sisters’, a phrase that Shakespeare borrowed from Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (I577) - his source for the story of the play. In Holinshed ‘weird’ retains its older meaning of ‘fate’ (it was originally a noun) - they are referred to as ‘the weird sisters, that is . . . the goddesses of destinie’. But Shakespeare may well not have known this older meaning of the word, which survived only in the North, and, as A. C. Bradley pointed out, the activities described by the witches at the beginning of I. i. are characteristic of the traditional witches of popular belief, rather than of goddesses of destiny. They are not, it is true, the harmless old women who suffered in the witch trials, but rather how their persecutors thought of them, and how they were sometimes deluded into thinking of themselves.

In all respects they conform to the popular theories of witchcraft at the times. They have no power of their own, but gain it by selling their souls to the devil. They are only the ‘instruments’ of darkness-(I. 3. 124); Shakespeare’s witches refer even to the apparitions that they raise as their ‘masters’ (IV. I. 63). According to Scot, it was believed that the devil taught them to steal unbaptised children (compare IV. I. 30-I)

and James records in Demonology that ‘the devil causeth them to joint dead corpses (compare I.3.28, IV. 1. 29), and to make powders thereof (compare IV.1.23), mixing such other things there amongst as he gives unto them.’

The ‘familiar spirits’ who both controlled and assisted the witch were minor devils who often took the form of animals — Scot mentions in particular toads and cats (compare I. I. 8, 9). With their aid witches could ‘foreshow things to come’ and ‘raise hail, tempests, and hurtfull weather’ (compare I. 1. 2, 3. 11-25, IV. I. 52-60). One detail that Shakespeare may have borrowed directly from the Demonology is the ‘fog and filthy air’ into which the witches vanish at the end of the first scene - James had attempted to explain their invisibility by suggesting that the devil might ‘thicken and obscure so the air … that the beams of any other man’s eyes cannot pierce through the same, to see them’.

This study of evil is further generalised by the way in which it is interwoven with the supernatural structure of the play. It has been suggested that the trance-like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth’s ‘raptness’ when the witches first tempt him and he sees Banquo’s ghost, would have indicated to a Jacobean audience they were the victims of demonic possession. They behave compulsively, as if they were controlled by evil spirits rather than by their own conscious minds. Macbeth’s inability to pray (II. 2. 28-33) is another symptom of this condition, and Lady Macbeth’s ‘damned spot’ might have suggested the devil’s mark that was to be found on a witch. She actually assumes the role of a witch when she summons the ‘spirits that tend on mortal thoughts’ to possess her body (see I. 5. 3-49 and notes), and the Doctor’s comment that she needs the divine more than the physician might mean that she is in need of exorcism as well as spiritual healing. ‘Fiendlike’ certainly seems a more apt description of her than ‘butcher’ does of Macbeth.

But Shakespeare is not merely portraying demonic possession. The Jacobeans were less simple-minded about the supernatural than is often supposed; their psychological theory may have been rudimentary, but their psychological observation was as acute as ours. The sleep walking is at least as true to twentieth-century theories of repression as it is to seventeenth-century beliefs in possession; the ‘spot’ that brands Lady Macbeth is, after all, in her mind, not on her body. For Shakespeare and his audience supernatural forces were not only external powers, but forces within the mind. Evil spirits could have no influence over human beings unless they had already admitted evil into their minds, just as in the play it appears that Macbeth has already entertained the murderous thoughts in which the witches encourage him. If he and his wife are possessed by evil, it is because they allow themselves to be possessed; the compulsion is psychological rather than supernatural

A sharp distinction between these two elements in the play misrepresents it, for in Macbeth the one continually merges with the other, what may be understood at one level as psychological may also be seen as supernatural ‘unnatural’ is a word that embraces both. The ‘spirits’ that Lady Macbeth would pour into her husband’s ear (I. 5. z5) are not so different from the ‘spirits .that tend on mortal thoughts’ that she summons to herself. There is a continuous scale from the merely metaphorical - ‘Pity, like a naked new-born babe’ or ‘heaven’s cherubin’ through the hallucinatory - the ‘air-drawn dagger’, which is certainly is an illusion, and Banquo’s ghost, which probably is (see note to III. 4 40 s d.) — to the witches, who clearly have an independent existence.: But even this distinction is blurred by the doubts of Macbeth and Banquo about the reality of what they have seen (I. 3. 7~85), and it is a short step from a ghost that is imaginary because its appearance depends on Macbeth’s state of mind to real witches who can influence him. only because his mind shares the evil that they represent. A debate on the degree to which one may be deceived by imagination was part of the entertainment provided for James at Oxford in I605, and this may have suggested to Shakespeare the hallucinatory power of Macbeth’s imagination, but this fusing of metaphor and reality in the play is characteristic of his dramatic style, and, indeed, of the imagination of the age.

The witches are the ‘instruments’ of the darkness that Macbeth and his wife invoke, as much the instruments of their dark thoughts as of the dark powers of hell. A Jacobean audience would have been much more ready than we are to believe in their objective existence, but for them, as well as for us, the witches would have personified the unnaturalness of the evil in Macbeth’s mind. Its perversion is apparent in their own deformity - they ‘should be women’ but their beards deny it - and in the mutilated fragments of animals and men from which their charms are brewed, and its sterility in their withered forms and in the: blasted heath. on which they meet (I. 3. 4~7, 77). Their doctrine reverses the natural order of things: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ is the Satanic principle of ‘Evil be thou my good’. It echoes in Macbeth’s first words (L -34 383; he goes on to adopt it in order to gain the throne then finds that he cannot escape from it.

The rest of the play explores the implications of this. The confusion of ‘fair’ with ‘foul’ is its constant theme; it is emphasised by the heavy irony of Duncan’s misjudgement of the two Thanes of Cawdor (I. 4. II-2I) and, in contrast, by his son’s elaborate testing of Macduff (see, especially, IV. 3. 23-4). The play is full of false appearances. Macbeth enters a world of false values in which he is guided by deceptive apparitions and hallucinations. His moral sense becomes as confused as are his physical senses when he cannot distinguish the real from the unreal dagger (II. 1. 40-4I), and it is the latter that directs him to the murder he follows unreality. After the murder Lady Macbeth attempts to reassure him with the illusory resemblance between the sleeping and the dead - a recurrent idea in the play (see note to II. 2. 53-4) — but shortly Macduff will summon them from the ‘counterfeit’ to ‘look on death itself’ (II. 3. 75). There is repeated reference to the murderer’s need for deception (I. 5. 62-5, 7. 81-2) and the false appearance that Macbeth thinks to assume temporarily has to become a settled practice; by the time he is planning the murder of Banquo it has become a burden:

He has condemned himself to living a lie. The same moral is suggested by the numerous images of clothing in the play, which are generally connected with the adoption of a new or false role (see I. 3. I08-9, I44-6, 7. 3~6, II. 4. 38). By the final scenes the royal robes have become another burden to Macbeth. His title hangs about him ‘like a giant’s robe/Upon a dwarfish thief’, and

The witches’ doctrine is in fact a self-deceiving one. ‘Foul’ is not ‘fair’, it only appears so; but the first half of their jingle is true, for what should have been ‘fair’ - kingship — becomes ‘foul’, polluted by the means by which it was obtained. The witches equivocate with Macbeth in their initial promise to him of’ things that do sound so fair’ (I. 3. 5), as well as in the prophecies of the apparitions. He achieves the title of king, but finds that he has sold his soul, his ‘eternal jewel’ (III. I. 67) - for something that proves worthless. They keep the word of promise to his ear, but break it to his hope.

Macbeth’s tragic error is to think that he can assume the unnatural character of evil in order to gain an immediate end, and then put it behind him. He hoped-that he could ‘trammel up the consequence’, but it is the moral consequence which he pretends to ignore, rather than physical revenge, that destroys him. The way in which his crime spreads through and corrupts his reign is reflected in the spreading pattern of imagery in the play, and in the way his earlier words echo through the later scenes and gradually reveal their true meaning. One such ironic sequence comments directly on the impossibility of escaping from one’s past deeds. Macbeth had hoped that the murder would be ‘done’ - over and done with - ‘when ‘tis done’ (I. 7. ~), but when the first murder fails to bring content this phrase is subtly changed, first to the grim resignation of Lady Macbeth’s ‘what’s done is done’ (III. z. I2) and then to her despairing ‘What’s done cannot be undone’ (V. 1. 68)’

One suspects that Macbeth really knew this all the time. His outburst when Duncan’s murder is discovered (II. 3. 8) sounds only half feigned, although it is not until the last act that he realises its full truth, when he sees life as ‘a tale/Told by: an idiot…Signifying nothing’ (V. 5. 26-8), and himself as ‘fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’ and deprived of

that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends. (V. 3. 23 6)

Yet the isolation from humanity that he laments here had originally been his own choice. His guilty thoughts had separated him from his companions when he- first met the witches, and he had deliberately left the banquet at which he should have been entertaining Duncan in order to brood on his murder; later, when his crimes prevent him from banqueting with his own thanes, he discovers that he has condemned himself to perpetual isolation.

He constantly finds that he is committed to the role of murderer. The images thrown up by his guilty conscience cling to him, like the blood that he fears will never wash off — the ‘secret murders sticking on his hands’ (V. 2. I7). As his crime was ‘unnatural’, a perversion of his own being as well as a violation of the natural obligations of a kinsman, a subject and a host (I. 7. I2-I63, he carries the consequences in his own nature, and the imagery that expresses this is concerned with the basic requirements of natural life - food, sleep and health. The banquet is a powerful symbol in the play (see introductory notes to I. 7. and III. 4.) and the imagery of food is often associated with that of sleep - ‘the season of all natures’ (III. 4. I40), great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast. (II. 2. 39-40)

The two are explicitly linked by Macbeth and by the Lord to whom Lennox speaks (III. 2. I7-I9, 6. -34-53. Deprivation of sleep is the chief symptom of the spiritual and psychological disease that afflicts the Macbeths (see note to TI. 2. 36). They have ‘infected minds’, and their cause is ‘distempered’ (V. I. 73, 2. I5). We have already seen how the disorder in their minds is reflected in the state of their kingdom and how this imagery of disease is contrasted with the health-giving powers of the true king. In her first speech Lady Macbeth had readily described their sin as an ‘illness’, and the metaphor takes on a terrible reality for them at the end of the play.

With disease goes sterility, which again they had deliberately courted when Macbeth identified himself with ‘withered Murder’ (II. I. 52), and Lady Macbeth called on the spirits to unsex her (I. 5. 39-42) and declared her readiness to dash her infant’s brains out (I. 7. 54-9); she would change her milk to gall, just as she would eradicate ‘th’ milk of human kindness’ from her husband (I. 5. 47, I6). In consequence, all they achieve is a ‘fruitless crown’ and a ‘barren sceptre’ (III. I. 60~I), symbolising the barrenness of their triumph. As the play proceeds Macbeth’s revolt against nature becomes more and more desperate. Unable to destroy ‘the seed of Banquo’ (III. I. 69), he would strike against the seeds of life itself. He will ‘let the frame of things disjoint’ (III. 2. I6); the witches shall answer him

His initial denial of his own nature has enmeshed him in a course of self-contradiction that leads only to a nihilistic desire for universal chaos.

To balance the forces of disorder and perversion represented by the witches, the play is full of images of natural growth. These are often associated with Banquo, ‘the root and father/Of many kings’ (III. I. 5-6); it is he who remarks on the ‘procreant cradle’ of the temple-haunting martlet, and who first introduces the theme in his demand to the witches —

This image is picked up in the next scene by Duncan,

continued by Banquo,

and echoed by Malcolm at the end of play (V. 9. 3I). In the later scenes there is a profusion of images of new life, contrasting with ‘the sere, the yellow leaf’ of Macbeth. The human is linked with natural animal life in an often startling way: Macduff’s son is called ‘You egg,/Young fry of treachery’ (IV. 2. 85~6), Malcolm - the ‘sovereign flower’(V. 2. 30) -describes himself as an ‘innocent lamb’, and Macduff mourns for his ‘pretty chickens and their dam’ (IV. 3. I6, 2I8). The youth of Malcolm’s army is emphasised (V. ~. 9-II), and exemplified by Young Siward, and when the boughs of Birnam wood are used to conceal their numbers it seems that nature itself is marching against the unnatural tyrant. This symbolism is dominated by the two apparitions of children, the second with a tree in its hand, which foretell and contribute to Macbeth’s death, and the thread of metaphor reaches back to his own horrified vision of ‘Pity, like a naked new-born babe’ as the agent of his destruction. The self-destroying forces of chaos are overthrown by the self-renewing powers of nature, which comprehend both organic physical life and the moral order that is necessary for the-health of the social organism.

This intricate interweaving of irony, image and symbol gives the play its imaginative and moral unity. There are many more strands that can be traced in this Introduction, many of which are referred to in the notes - ‘blood’, for example, is one of the most fertile symbols in the play, there are more than a hundred allusions to it. At the beginning we considered the accidental circumstances that probably influenced Shakespeare in the writing of Macbeth, but in the finished play nothing is accidental; every image, sometimes it seems every word, contributes directly to its complex theme. The larger symbolic structure grows organically and inevitably from the character of the hero.

Macbeth was one of the last tragedies that Shakespeare wrote. Of those that preceded it, Hamlet presents the most complex and probing study of its hero, while King Lear is the most ‘universal’, stripping human nature to its bare essentials and setting it in the midst of elemental forces. Macbeth presents a symbolic pattern, perhaps less inclusive, but as closely knit as that of Lear, centred on a character study, less wide in range, but penetrating as deeply as that of Hamlet. In Lear Shakespeare had shown the innate triumph of goodness, even though its chief representative is hanged at the end of the play. In Macbeth he shows the essentially self-defeating character of evil the unnatural striving to preserve itself by destroying the roots of its own existence.