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Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest, quickest tragedy. Its colours are black and red. It summons up dusk and midnight and at last a poor player who struts and frets with empty sound and fury, his life a candle that is snuffed out, signifying nothing. But along the way we witness high passion, vaulting ambition, alliances made and broken. Macbeth himself is great in action but not in judgement. Give him a task on the battlefield and he will carry it through with aplomb. But give him words and he will be first easily led, then hesitant. His wife chides him for this, but ironically as the two of them wade deeper into blood he becomes more purposeful, she a nightmare-beset shadow of her former self.
In Shakespearean tragedy, the time is out of joint and the lead character is out of his accustomed role. Hamlet the scholar is happy to be presented with an intellectual puzzle, but unsure how to proceed when presented with a demand to kill. Macbeth the soldier, by contrast, relishes violent action but is restless when it comes to waiting for his reward. Hamlet meditates on the nature of providence, while Macbeth is prompted to take his fate into his own hands. Imagine Macbeth in Hamlet's situation. He would have needed no second prompting. On hearing the ghost's story, he would have gone straight down from the battlements and unseamed King Claudius 'from the nave to th'chops'. His courage and his capacity to act are without question.
Macbeth is, however, more like Hamlet than appears at first glance. He has a conscience. When his ambition is stirred by the weyard sisters' prophecies, he tries to slap it down ('Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires'), and when he returns to his castle he soliloquizes on the afterlife every bit in the manner of the Danish prince. But where Hamlet is profoundly alone, unable to bring himself to confide in Ophelia because Gertrude has destroyed his faith in womankind, Macbeth has a wife to take charge of him. She enters as he is concluding his conscience-ridden soliloquy and with a few brisk exchanges and put-downs ('When you durst do it, then you were a man') she changes his mind and settles him to the terrible feat.
His conscience is still working after the regicide, as he is haunted by the sound of the voice crying 'Sleep no more.' His wife, on the other hand, is cool and practical ('A little water clears us of this deed'). But as the play progresses, in one of Shakespeare's finest structural movements, a reversal takes place. It is Lady Macbeth who sleeps no more, whose mind is emptied of everything save the night of the murder, who cannot wash away the blood ('All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'). Macbeth, by contrast, steeps himself so far in blood that it becomes easier to carry on than to turn back. He does not tell his wife about the plan to murder Banquo and Fleance, and by the fourth act, when he massacres Macduff's innocent family, she has temporarily disappeared from the action. By the fifth, he is willing on the final encounter: 'Blow wind, come wrack, / At least we'll die with harness on our back.' The final thoughts inspired by his wife are fatalistic: she began by spurring him to take his destiny into his own hands, she ends as the provocation to his meditation on the meaninglessness of life.
Macbeth is a play about how dreams may become nightmares, how a castle that by day seems the pleasant seat of nesting birds is transformed by night into hell itself (with a grimly witty Porter at the gate). And how the world may be turned upside down: the sun refuses to rise the morning after Duncan has been killed and other strange phenomena are interpreted as disruptions of the natural order. The English court, in contrast, is represented as a haven, a place of grace and 'healing benediction'. Malcolm's stay in England serves as an education into virtue. His conquest of Scotland, with the worthy English Siward in support, is made to seem like a restoration of nature, the moving trees of Birnam symbolic of spring and rebirth. The play was written in the first few years after James I united the thrones of Scotland and England: Macduff's final entrance with the tyrant's head and his announcement that the time is free express hope for an end to the uncertainty about the nation's future which had attended the final years of the Virgin Queen's reign.
Within weeks of James VI of Scotland becoming James I of England in 1603, Shakespeare's acting company were given the title 'The King's Men'. In return for this honour, they were expected to play at court whenever required. They duly gave more command performances at royal events than any of their rivals: between ten and twenty shows per year for the rest of Shakespeare's career. Macbeth is steeped in the preoccupations of the new king: the rights of royal succession, the relationship between England and Scotland, the reality of witchcraft, the sacred powers of the monarch (James revived the ancient custom of 'touching' his subjects in order to cure them of scrofula, 'the king's evil'). And there was one enduring concern inherited from his predecessor's reign: anxiety about high treason and Roman Catholic plots. The Porter's reference to 'equivocation' has often been seen as an allusion to the verbal cunning shown by Father Garnet, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, during his trial in the early months of 1606.
Whether or not there were such things as witches was a fiercely debated subject in the period. In his treatise Of Demonology , King James affirmed that there were. He believed that nine times out of ten, witches were women, but women with unnaturally masculine features such as facial hair; that they were in league with the devil, that they had familiar spirits in the shape of cats and toads, that their most dangerous work consisted of conjuring up images of people and cursing them, that they sent succubi to remove the sexual life-blood from men, that they caused disease in animals. One could establish whether or not a woman was devilishly possessed by a 'witch mark' on her body which would not bleed when pricked (when Shylock in The Merchant of Venice says 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' he means that Jews are not devilish in the way that witches are). The Macbeth witches answer to most of these characteristics: they are women with beards, summoning Grey Malkin the cat and Paddock the toad, whilst lines such as 'I'll drain him dry as hay' and 'killing swine' suggest succubi and diseased livestock.
Yet no one in the play calls them 'witches'. They are always the 'weyard sisters'. The adjective denotes both their prophetic power and their waywardness, the sense that they exist in an untamed space beyond the margins of society. What is more, the earliest eyewitness account of Macbeth on stage, written by Dr Simon Forman after he saw a performance in 1611, refers to them as 'fairies or nymphs'. Macbeth 's source, Holinshed's 'Chronicle of Scotland', variously calls them 'weird sisters', 'fairies' and 'women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of the elder world'. A woodcut in Holinshed shows them as rather grumpy but elegantly dressed ladies, certainly not bearded hags. A further complication is that the only surviving printed text of Macbeth seems to represent the play not as it was written by Shakespeare, but as it was revised for later performance, probably by the younger dramatist Thomas Middleton, who had written a play of his own called The Witch . There is a genuine possibility that Shakespeare intended the women to be 'weyard sisters', prophets akin to the classical sibyl, and that it was only with Middleton that they were converted into full-blown witches with double-trouble cauldron (Forman's recollection of seeing the play in 1611 makes no mention of Macbeth's return visit in the fourth act).
Why was King James so interested in witches? The main reason was that his ideology of kingship was closely bound to a cosmology of good and evil. He believed passionately in the idea that the monarch was God's representative on earth, the embodiment of virtue, blessed with the power to heal his people and restore cosmic harmony. The idea that the devil was active in the world through the dark agency of witchcraft was the necessary antithesis of this vision. The imagery of Shakespeare's play creates a pervasive sense of connection between the state and the cosmos: witness those signs of disruption in the order of nature reported by Lennox and Ross on the night of Duncan's murder.
Another consequence of James' theory of kingship was the idea that royal succession was divinely ordained rather than achieved arbitrarily through a struggle between rival candidates or a popular vote. It is therefore extremely significant that in Holinshed's Chronicles Duncan's anointing of his son Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland is a turning-point in Scottish history: this is the moment when the principle of primogeniture is established in Scotland. In Holinshed, Macbeth is Duncan's cousin and until this moment he has the right to the succession in the event of Duncan dying before Malcolm comes of age.
In the mid-twentieth century there was a tendency among critics to mock the Victorian scholar A. C. Bradley for treating Shakespeare's characters as if they were real people, with a past and a life beyond that which is seen on stage. The shorthand term for this mockery was Bradley's question 'How many children had Lady Macbeth?' But Bradley has outlasted his critics: to a greater degree than any other writer prior to the flowering of the realist novel, Shakespeare did use language to create the illusion that his characters have an interior life and that there is a 'back story' to his plots. The language of Macbeth is steeped in images of children, of birth, of inheritance and future generations. The sons of Duncan, Banquo and Macduff are all crucial to the action, and there is even a telling bitpart for the son of the English soldier Siward. No other Shakespearean tragedy has so many significant male children in the cast. Only Macbeth is without a son. Hence his appalled realization that he has a barren sceptre in his hand, that his bloody deeds have been done only 'to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings'.
Shakespeare doesn't usually portray married couples working together as partners. There are moments of exceptional tenderness between the Macbeths. Yet there is an emptiness at the core of their relationship. The play is scarred by images of sterility and harrowed by glimpses of dead babies. Is power in the end a substitute for love, ambition nothing but compensation for the sorrow of childlessness? It has to be assumed that Lady Macbeth means what she says when she speaks of giving suck and knowing how tender it is to love the babe that milks her: we can only assume that the Macbeths have had a child and lost it. Perhaps that is why they channel the energies of their marriage into the lust for power instead.
Shakespeare is the least autobiographical of great writers, but can it be entirely a coincidence that, a decade before, he too had lost a child, his only son Hamnet, and that in the years since then he had channelled all his creative powers not into a family, but into his work, his theatre company, and the thrill of those extraordinary occasions when he found himself – a grammar boy from the provinces with no university education – witnessing the King of England and Scotland, with all his court, listening in rapt attention as his words were spoken from the platform of the banqueting hall in the royal palace?
AUTHORSHIP: There is no doubt about Shakespeare's authorship of the bulk of the play, but it is probable that the printed text bears the marks of some theatrical revision, possibly by THOMAS MIDDLETON . In particular, the scenes involving Hecate seem to be additions by Middleton.
PLOT: Macbeth and Banquo, generals in the service of King Duncan of Scotland, are returning victorious from battle when they are hailed by three witches or 'weyard sisters' who prophesy that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor and then King of Scotland, whereas Banquo's descendants will be kings. The first part of the prophesy is soon fulfilled when Duncan rewards Macbeth's loyal service: encouraged by this, and playing on her husband's ambition, Lady Macbeth persuades him to murder Duncan while he is a guest at their castle. Malcolm and Donalbain, Duncan's sons, flee to England for safety. Macbeth, now king, has Banquo murdered in an attempt to secure his own position, but Banquo's ghost appears to him at a banquet. Macbeth visits the witches again. They warn him to beware of Macduff, a noble who has also fled to England, but assure him that he cannot be harmed by any man born of woman. Macbeth orders the murder of Macduff's wife and children. In England, Malcolm tests Macduff's loyalty and they then raise an army to march against Macbeth, but he, armed with the witches' prophecy, believes himself invincible. As his enemies draw nearer, Macbeth learns that his wife is dead. He faces Macduff in combat but when he learns Macduff was born by Caesarian section he realizes that he must face death. Malcolm is crowned King of Scotland.
MAJOR PARTS: ( with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage ) Macbeth (29%/146/15), Lady Macbeth (11%/59/9), Malcolm (9%/40/8), Macduff (7%/59/7), Ross (6%/39/7), Banquo (5%/33/7), First Witch (3%/23/4), Lennox (3%/21/6), Duncan (3%/18/3), Second Witch (2%/15/3), Third Witch 2%/13/3, Porter (2%/4/1), Wife of Macduff (2%/19/1), Scottish Doctor (2%/19/2).
LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 95% verse, 5% prose.
DATE: 1606? Certainly Jacobean rather than Elizabethan, to judge from its several compliments to King James. Performed at the Globe in April 1611 and perhaps at court in August or December 1606. References to 'equivocation' and other allusions suggest written soon after trial of Gunpowder Plot conspirators (January–March 1606). The ship Tiger , mentioned in Act 1 scene 3, sailed for the east in 1604 and returned after a terrible voyage in the summer of 1606.
SOURCES: Based on account of reigns of Duncan and Makbeth in 'The Chronicles of Scotland', from vol. 2 of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587 edition), with some use of material elsewhere in the Scottish chronicles. Shows awareness of the Stuart dynasty's claim to lineage from Banquo. Some of the imagery is influenced by the language of Seneca's tragedies. Hecate scenes incorporate material from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch .
TEXT: 1623 Folio is the only early printed text. Its brevity suggests possible theatrical cutting. Good quality of printing, though with severe problems of lineation.