Q. Comment on the different stages of development of Macbeth’s character in the play ‘Macbeth’.
It is a commonplace of Shakespearean criticism that his tragedies are dramatization of particular evil or weakness embodied in the characters of the heroes. In tragedies we are shown a dominating figure by his own errors and wrong choices comes to ruin and brings ruin upon others. Each of his tragic heroes is observed by some powerful, overmastering passions, on account of which he is driven to commit errors which have tragic consequences. ‘Macbeth’ is a tragedy of ambition, the royal ambition of Macbeth and his wife. The sense of tragedy ties in the degeneration of the character of Macbeth.
Macbeth is a tragic hero, because, in all respects, he is an extra-ordinary person. As the play opens, he described with all the favourite epithets possible. He is ‘brave’, ‘noble’ and ‘valour’s minion’. Rosse, who describes to Duncan the chivalrous activities of Macbeth in Act I, Scene 2, says that Macbeth fought like ‘Bellona’s Bridegroom’ in the battlefield. Duncan speaks of him as ‘valiant cousin’ and ‘worthy gentleman’. Macbeth defeats the combined forces of Macdonwald, Thane of Cawdor and the King of Norway and thus protects his country as well as Duncan from serious crisis. We never think that the admiration and honour showered on Macbeth are undeserved, until he meets the witches.
Macbeth’s tragic flaw is his vaulting ambition. He draws our sympathy, in the initial part of the play, as he suffers from an immense conflict between his conscience and ambition. Perhaps he has already thought of becoming the King of Scotland, but he has suppressed that aspiration because he has received no encouragement from the outside world. Once the witches mention it, he becomes restless and the conflict in his mind becomes more intense. It is, of course, true that Lady Macbeth plays a crucial role in providing a strong inspiration to her husband to adopt foul means to achieve his goal. She masterminds the murder of Duncan and provokes her husband’s manhood and explains to him that it is cowardice not to grab the opportunity when it comes. Macbeth’s weakness lies in the fact that he cannot refuse her arguments. His own greed and the ‘valour’ of the ‘tongue’ overpower of him.
Though Macbeth is drawn to the path of sin, he is still worthy of admiration as a tragic hero that he is not essentially a villain is evident in the following speech of Lady Macbeth:
“Yet do I fear thy nature
It is too full of the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.”
– Shakespeare has drawn the character of Macbeth with an imaginative sympathy. He does not want us to extenuate Macbeth’s evil deeds; he does not want us to compromise with evil; he does not want us to side with a criminal; but he does want us to imagine a soul so tempted and goaded on as Macbeth’s is and to examine within ourselves whether we would not have acted in the same way as his hero-villain does.
In Act I, Scene 3, we find Macbeth hesitating to take up the final decision of assassinating Duncan. He fears that his sinful acts will bring dire consequence on him. He thinks of his responsibility bring Duncan as a relative, as a subject and as a host. Macbeth finds no strong incentive to urge him into the act of murder except his soaring ambition, which he doubts, will cause his own downfall. Even when he finally resolves to kill the king, he is fully aware of the wickedness of his motive:
“Away and mock the time with fairest show
False face must hide what the fake heart doth know.”
Macbeth’s soliloquy in the dagger-scene clearly shows the pangs of his guilty conscience.
We observe a quick degeneration in Macbeth’s character after the murder of Duncan. In order to prevent Banquo issues from becoming kings after him, he designs a cool-headed plan to murder Banquo and his son, Fleance. His embarrassment and nervous fits in the banquet scene are results of his own evil deeds. Like a shrewd villain he notices Macduff’s absence from the banquet party. When he learns from the ghostly appearances apparitions that Macduff will cause trouble to him, he decides to attack Fife and kill all the members of Macduff’s family.
Though he becomes a ruthless tyrant, Macbeth does not lose our sympathy completely. This is because memory of old glory haunts him continuously. A sense of futility envelops his mind particularly after the death of Lady Macbeth. He looks upon life only as a passing illusion:
“Life is but a walking shadow; a poor player
That shouts and frets him hours upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.”
He feels that he has given away his ‘eternal jewel’ to ‘the common enemy of man’. It is this realization on the part of Macbeth, which wins our sympathy for him. He realizes that in destroying Duncan he has destroyed himself. In this sense it is that life becomes for him a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. All this comes as a result of his initial crime. Even after his fall Macbeth makes an evaluation of his life; he realizes that his trust in the witches’ prediction was an imprudent act:
“And be these juggling friends no more believed
That palter with us in a double sense;”
Macbeth accepts death heroically without yielding to Macduff as praying for life to him. His keen perception and fire sensibility do not leave him until the end of his life. It is his spiritual loneliness that intensifies his tragedy. Macbeth ends up as a criminal and yet he is a ‘tragic-hero’ in the fullest sense of term. He reveals traces of humaneness even when he has become a lost soul. His sufferings, his haunting imagination, his remorse and his increasing and deepening isolation force us to retain pity for him, however little it maybe throughout the play. It is easy to condemn a bad man and so difficult to admire and pity a good man’s fall. Shakespeare has chosen the difficult way and succeeded in eliciting from us a human pity for the fall of a good man. He has done this by dramatizing the agony and spiritual anguish of a damned soul in the poetic outpouring of that agony. Indeed in no other tragic hero of his, Shakespeare has displayed so much understanding of the complexity of human nature as he has done in portraying the character of Macbeth.
“Mercyful powers
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way in repose” ---
Q. Analyse the character of Banquo, in the light of this statement.
Banquo is an unfortunate man – perhaps the most unfortunate, with the possible exception of Brutus, in the whole gamut Shakespearean tragedy. Like Macbeth, he is also general in the Scottish army, showing as much courage and heroism as befits a faithful soldiers. His name is also pronounced with equal reverence by the bleeding sergeant in at once into. He too is a ‘lion’ – the enemies are ‘hares’. However, in the context of the play he remains under-sketched and ruthlessly relegated (marginalized) to the periphery of the tragic action.
Banquo is first introduced in the third scene of the play along with Macbeth. It is he, who first discovers the witches and enquires about their identity:
“What are these,
So wither’d and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth,
And yet are on’t?”
He also notices Macbeth’s sharp reaction to the prophesies of the sisters:
“Good Sir, why do you start, and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?”
His human curiosity to ‘look into the seeds of time’ propels him to inquire about his future. But he receives enigmatic and baffling replies, which do not promise him any material gift; he is promised something that is denied to Macbeth:
“Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.
Not so happy, yet much happier.”
Though the witches did not have any intention to meet Banquo on the heath, their prediction for him becomes the fulcrum of the tragic manner and the place Banquo on the traitor of grave personal danger. He becomes not only a witness to the prophesies made to Macbeth, but also a living challenge to the peace of Macbeth, particularly after the witches’ prediction for him. That is why Macbeth’s first reaction after the departure of the witches is:
“Your children shall be kings.”
In a paradoxical way, Banquo, by his mere presence at the time of prediction, becomes Macbeth’s nemesis in the sense that the protagonist experiences a downward slide in fortune for the first time while trying to deprive Banquo the priviledge of founding a dynasty.
Banquo’s reaction to the prophesies of the weird sisters is also quite interesting. He does not seek any favour from them; nor is he afraid of their evil powers. After the disappearance of the witches, he questions the validity and reality of the experiences, while Macbeth is seriously involved. Banquo suffers from low illusion regarding the witches. Even when Macbeth has become the Thane of Cawdor, he declares that these ‘instruments of darkness’ (witches) are actually treacherous because:
“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of Darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.”
Banquo is aware that no good can come out of the core of evil and therefore he does not considered the witches trustworthy.
Surprisingly, Banquo’s hatred for evil undergoes a significant metamorphosis after the death of Duncan. In Act I, Scene 3, the witches were agents of darkness. But the same beings are called Fates of Banquo in Act III, Scene 2. Although he believes that Macbeth played most foully to achieve his goal, he patiently waits for the prediction to turn into reality for him. Here he is more openly optimistic about his chances to ‘beget kings’ and in the process exposes himself to Macbeth’s apprehension. His optimism makes him ironically the target of a bloodthirsty man who wishes to protect his kingdom for his own issues.
Apparently Macbeth stands for the realization of an ambition through evil means, and Banquo represents the idea of duty, loyalty and integrity. It is true that he is not sufficiently rewarded for those qualities in him. In spite of his loyalty to Macbeth, the later masterminds his extinction. Banquo serves as a foil to Macbeth and his very existence is threat to the usurper. The character of Banquo helps us to understand the degradation of Macbeth, the central character. His moral uprightness, disintegrity and loyalty are not welcomed by Macbeth whose dislike for these positive qualities reminds us of the witches’ utterance:
“Here is foul
And foul’s play
So it would not be unjustified to call Banquo another victim of the witches.
Q. Examine Lady Macbeth’s role in the execution of Macbeth’s ambitious plan. How does this affect Lady Macbeth herself?
Lady Macbeth is an important character in Shakespeare’s tragic play, ‘Macbeth’. She is Macbeth’s wife and plays a significant role in pushing Macbeth towards the path of sin to fulfil his ambition. She is conceived by the dramatist as a woman with a very strong will as her husband is endowed with a very strong imagination. She is single-minded in realising her ambition – or rather the ambition of her husband to whom she is entirely devoted. It is for him that she suppresses her conscience and womanliness by a deliberate act of her will. She wishes him to be great in reality as he is great in his capacities. Though she is essentially a woman, lust of power and sky-kissing ambition make her unnaturally cruel and ruthless in the initial part of the play. But her wounded conscience takes its revenge upon her. Towards the end of the play we find that she has lost her mental balance. She meets a tragic end and dies of a mental agony.
The concept ‘character is Destiny’ is thoroughly applicable in the case of Lady Macbeth. In the classical tragedies the protagonists have to face a cruel Destiny. But Destiny cannot be blamed for the suffering of Lady Macbeth. She is herself responsible to a great extent for the mental anguish that she undergoes before her death. Macbeth was Thane of Glamis and after his successful victory over Macdonwald and his allies he was made Thane of Cawdor. The king of Scotland himself decided to honour Macbeth by paying a visit to the latter’s castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth could have been happy with all these achievements of her husband. But her ambition grew sharpened on receiving a letter from Macbeth in which he had confined to her about prediction made to him by the witches. Since she had known her husband well, she felt that a kind-hearted and conscientious man like Macbeth could not adopt a foul means to accomplish his cherished goal.
We find Lady Macbeth as a strong personality, a woman of perfect resolution at least in the initial part of the play. She has enough self-confidence and she knows that she has the power to move her husband according her own will:
“Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in their ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round.”
As soon as she learns the news of Duncan’s imminent arrival in their castle she makes up her mind to assassinate the king. After meeting Macbeth she advices him what to do or not to as long as the king remains in their castle. She assures her husband that she will manage everything if he works according to her plan. She appears here as a cool-headed conspirator who masterminds the details of murder. She cautions her husband not to betray through his countenance the feelings of his heart:
“To beguile the time,
Look like the Time; bear welcome in your eye
… Look like th’ innocent flower
But be the serpent under’t.”
According to A.W. Verity, Lady Macbeth is the Clytemnestra of English tragedy. She posses a frightfully determined will. After the arrival of Duncan and his companions in their castle Lady Macbeth plays her role as a gallant hostess perfectly. She receives the king with all the show of humility and servitude. She reproves her husband sharply when the latter hesitates to proceed towards the heinous business of murdering Duncan. She argues that he should not be frightened to work for the goal which he holds to be a precious one. He will turn a coward in his own estimation once he misses the chance of reaching his target. In order to encourage Macbeth she says:
“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 pluck’d my nipple from his bonelss gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.”
This shows that Lady Macbeth overstretches her human capacity to instigate her husband to commit the murder.
But the essential woman in Lady Macbeth does not remain concealed for a long. After the murder of Duncan she gradually weakens inwardly and her mental balance appears totally collapsed in the sleep-walking scene (Act V, Scene 1). The weight of remorse crushes the strong-willed Lady breaks under remorse and she becomes an invalid, assigned to the charge of nurse and a doctor. As a matter of fact, she never wakes to the realities of life after the banquet scene. She only wakes to talk and walk in a state of somnambulism. She smells blood in her hands and remarks that ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. The way Lady Macbeth is presented in this scene moves us to pity for her. The physician excellently sums up our response to the suffering of Lady Macbeth :
“Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.”
The character of Lady Macbeth is generally described as that of a she-monster. Some critics have tried to suggest that Lady Macbeth is the fourth witch in the play. But this is not a correct estimation of her character. She is essentially a woman who over-taxes her power to perform evil out of greed. But the inward goodness of her character could not be suppressed for a long time. The sleep-walking scene is a spectacle of her internal suffering. It raises her status to the level of a tragic heroine.
