William Shakespeare: Macbeth (1606)

[Image source: https://shakespeareillustration.org/2016/08/08/banquo/amp/ . Illustration by H. C. Selous, engraved by Frederick Wentworth. Macbeth (left) and Banquo (third from left). The other two are Ross and Angus.]


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[Lady.]                             Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o'the milk of human-kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly
That wouldst thou holily, wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.      (I.5.14-20)

We don't know how long the Macbeths have been together but it feels like a relationship that's matured over a long time, and certainly one that's closer than many marriages are. What has taken root in the heart of it, though, isn't sex or family or attending cultural events or doing up the house, but a dreadful obsession with getting to the top, no matter how. Macbeth in the letter calls her "my dearest partner of greatness". Evidently, they've been talking about their joint ambition for a long time. In that secret converse they refer to the present ruler not as "the King", but as plain "Duncan"; just an occupant, waiting to be dislodged (cf. Richard II III.3, where York picks up Northumberland for saying plain "Richard").

And she knows her husband very well. "[Thou] wouldst not play false, / And yet wouldst wrongly win" exactly describes what Macbeth has just been thinking:

[Macbeth.]                    Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.   (I.4.51-54)

yet let that be: happen, take place, come to pass
when it is done: at the moment of execution

Most humans who do an evil thing use their extravagant powers of ingenuity to persuade themselves that the thing is really good, or if not absolutely good, then absolutely necessary, or at least understandable, or not so simple to label. We use phrases about being big enough to take the tough decisions, or about having the vision to see a greater good, or we blame others (especially the victims), say that they deserved it or brought it on themselves, or we say that everyone's doing it, and that others would do it to us if they got half a chance, and that you wouldn't rush to judgment if you were in my position or knew all the facts.

One of the most admirable yet most truly terrible things about the Macbeths is that they have no truck with this pathetically all-too-human litany of excuses, rationalizations and tactical half-truths. It never occurs to Macbeth to think that he's only doing what others would do if they dared, or that Duncan's too-trusting nature showed him unfit to rule, or that he was led on to it by the Witches, or forced into it by his wife's taunts. He sees with perfect clarity that there are no extenuating circumstances. (Perhaps there's a kind of personal pride in declining to make any excuses, even in his own mind.)

[Macbeth.]                     He's here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off . . .   (I.7.12-20)

No wonder Macbeth doesn't want to see what his hand is doing. Without any recourse to the palliative powers of rationalization, the only other way to ease the execution is to undertake it in a state of mental derangement, such as exalted intoxication or stupefied automation. Lady Macbeth takes the first approach; her husband takes the second.

In her ecstatic invocation of the "murdering ministers", she says:

[Lady.]                            Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it.              (I.5.41-45)

The last part of this sentence is difficult to construe, though I think everyone understands the general drift. Benjamin Heath's paraphrase (from back in 1765) remains the most persuasive: "That no compunctious visitings of nature may prevail upon me to give place in my mind to peaceful thoughts, or to rest one moment in quiet from this hour of my purpose to its full completion in the effect."  (It might have helped if Shakespeare had preserved the temporal sequence, i.e. by writing "It and the effect".)

Lady Macbeth knows how fatally easy it is to "go off the boil". And Macbeth quickly learns from her:

[Macbeth.]                  - Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.  (II.1.59-60)

Later in the play, as he gets more used to murder, he comes to pride himself on instant execution (the only thing left, perhaps, that he could pride himself on):

[Macbeth.]                                           And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise,
Seize upon Fife, give to the edge o'the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting, like a fool;
This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.  (IV.1.147-153)

It's almost as if he's been watching Hamlet and is determined not to make the same mistake!

Lady Macbeth's "compunctious visitings" are revealing. Right in the middle of dedicating herself to pure evil, she shows that compunction ("a feeling of moral scruple") is part of her nature, a feeling not wholly alien to her. We see other signs of it elsewhere, in her knowing "how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me" or "Had he not resembled / My father as he slept"...  She makes the decision to bury her pity; it's a wilful self-traumatization.

Macbeth, on the other hand, shows no susceptibility to pity. He is far from despising his victims (indeed he openly admires Duncan and Banquo) but he has no pity for them, just phrases of conventional piety:

Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.   (II.1.63-64)

It is concluded! Banquo, thy soul's flight,
If it find heaven, must find it out tonight.   (III.1.140-141)

What holds him back before his first crime is something else, a moral horror of his own act, especially as seen through the eyes of others. Macbeth at this early stage is by no means unsusceptible to looking well in the eyes of the world:

[Macbeth.] He hath honoured me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.  (I.7.32-35)

He has a great, if conventional, respect for social forms. Even later on, he takes some pains to appear well in the eyes of Banquo, Banquo's murderers, and the lords at the "solemn supper"; it's increasingly pathetic, horrible, and ineffective. It's a fitting punishment that Macbeth does know, before the end, that everyone hates him.

Angus.                          Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach.
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.   (V.2.16-22)

[Macbeth.] I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.    (V.3.22-28)


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          Enter Lady Macbeth
Lady.    What's the business
That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
The sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!
Macduff.                                               O gentle lady,
'Tis not for you to hear what I can speak.
The repetition in a woman's ear
Would murder as it fell.
          Enter Banquo
                                     O Banquo, Banquo!
Our royal master's murdered.
Lady.                                    Woe, alas!
What, in our house!
Banquo.                    Too cruel, anywhere.
Dear Duff, I prithee contradict thyself
And say it is not so.    (II.3.78-87)

It's conventional for commentators to remark that Lady Macbeth's "What, in our house!" is a false note, betraying a shallow nature, and that Banquo's "Too cruel, anywhere" is a reproof: as if he's saying "You're making it all about you". I have even seen performances where her naïve self-centredness raises a laugh.

I think that's wrong. As Macduff's preceding speech shows, the Scottish lords are firm believers in gender roles and would absolutely expect a woman to see things from a narrowly domestic point of view. And from that point of view, while the murder of a king is certainly a tragic thing, the really devastating aspect is for it to happen while he's a guest in your own house. Banquo wouldn't, I feel,  address his hostess at this moment, certainly not in reproof. He's responding to Macduff by expressing his own strong emotion of horror, as often in the drama of Shakespeare's time, and indeed in real life, by capping the previous expression with an even stronger one.

Lady Macbeth's surprise is, of course, feigned. But the best way to feign is to say just what you would genuinely say, and I think she does. (And though the surprise is feigned, the horror is perhaps real.)

And in fact Shakespeare does portray her as someone whose world is a domestic one. She is an accomplished hostess, she's in the habit of preparing a hot drink for her husband at bed-time, she knows where all her guests are lodged. No-one in Macbeth is very learned -- just the odd reference to biblical or classical lore -- but Lady Macbeth's range of allusion is especially homely: to the "poor cat i'the adage", or "A woman's story at a winter's fire, / Authorized by her grandam". Imagination for her means a child's silliness: "'Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil". We might not know how many children she had, but the nursery is evidently a familiar place to her.


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[Macbeth.]                      Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; and in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be feared. 'Tis much he dares,
And to that dauntless temper of his mind
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety. There is none but he
Whose being I do fear; and under him
My genius is rebuked as, it is said,
Mark Antony's was by Caesar.  (III.1.48-56)

Macbeth.  Why should I play the Roman fool and die
On mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes
Do better upon them. (V.6.40-42)

Evidently, Shakespeare was already thinking about Antony and Cleopatra, the tragedy that came next (in 1607).  And there are some aspects of Macbeth that recall his Roman plays, especially Julius Caesar. Tyranny, nobles, ghosts, the heavens shadowing the murderous deeds of men.

Ross.                                      Ha, good father,
Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threatens his bloody stage. By the clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp . . . (II.4.4-7)

There's even a certain resemblance in the structure: a first half of overwhelming dramatic tension leading up to a desperate act, the killing of a ruler. And then a second half at a somewhat lower pitch,  nevertheless consisting of individually brilliant scenes that, in the re-reading anyway, we come to deeply relish. (A bit like the form later taken by many romantic symphonies and concertos).


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A. C. Bradley pointed out how many of the lines of Macbeth, aside from those belonging to its principal couple, would be quite difficult for most of us to attribute to their speaker. This is because of the important yet essentially choral roles played by the other thanes. All of them speak wonderful poetry, concise, pithy, and yet subdued, impersonal.

 Five of them that may be said to represent typical thanes, indeed the whole Scottish nation: Lennox, Ross, Angus, Menteth, and Cathness. Macduff emerges from that crowd gradually;  Banquo more immediately; Malcolm and Donalbain are different in being younger, and the sons of Duncan. The Seywards are English. But all these characters have a common ingredient, a certain undifferentiated decency. A reminder of what Macbeth (also a thane) perhaps never truly had, and certainly throws away.

It's interesting to watch how Shakespeare shuffles his pack of lesser lords.
 (I'm including Macduff in this list, too):
I.2 Lennox, then Ross and Angus (mute)
I.3 Ross and Angus
I.4 Lennox, then Ross and Angus (all mute)
I.6 Macduff, Lennox, Ross and Angus (all mute)
II.3 Macduff and Lennox; Lennox briefly leaves the stage, returns with Ross (mute)
II.4 Ross, then Macduff
III.4 Ross, Lennox and "Lords". The latter speak only in chorus.
III.6 Lennox and another Lord (definitely not Macduff and probably not Ross, but could be Angus, Menteth or Cathness).
IV.1 Lennox
IV.2 Ross
IV.3 Macduff, then Ross
V.2 Menteth, Angus, Cathness, Lennox
V.4 Macduff, Menteth, Angus (mute), Cathness (mute)
V.6 Macduff, Ross. All the others are probably included (and mute) in Malcolm's "army".

They form a group portrait. Shakespeare suggests a living, interlinked society while leaving the details shadowy, not spelled out. Banquo is apparently the cousin of Ross and Angus; Ross is cousin to the Macduffs; Macbeth is cousin to Duncan (the word in Shakespeare's day was used loosely, but it did imply kinship). Macbeth is the friend of Banquo and, in former days, Macduff. So society is organized in clusters, but they are dynamic ones.

After Macbeth becomes king, society elongates into a spectrum. Macduff places a definite distance between himself and the tyrant. Ross represents those who have connections with Macduff. Lennox becomes representative of those who, like Banquo, stay closer to Macbeth (though nearly or quite as horrified by him as the others are).

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If (as most believe) the three witches were played by men rather than boys, their parts could be doubled with Menteth or Cathness (or Seyward, the Old Man, the Doctor...) -- but not with Lennox, Ross or Angus.

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When Shakespeare wrote Macbeth there was plenty of spectacle: the possibly airborne witches, their sudden vanishings, the cauldron lit by flames from below, the ghost of Banquo and the procession of kings. But in its gloomy half-lit world there was, it seems, no music; the music was in the poetry.

The text as it appears in the 1623 First Folio contains some minor additions, by Thomas Middleton after 1609, to accommodate a bit of song and dance. Sir William Davenant's "operatic" adaptation of Macbeth (1666?) had music by Matthew Locke that was once much loved and continued to be used in performances right up to the early twentieth century. [The fashion for musical pantomime witches can also be seen in Thomas Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches (1681) and even Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (c. 1685, libretto by Nahum Tate).]

Macbeth music of various kinds has accreted ever since.

The London composer Samuel Arnold wrote some excellent incidental music for Macbeth in 1778. 

Beethoven wrote sketches for a Macbeth opera (1809-11), but his librettist Heinrich Joachim von Collin decided the subject was too gloomy, so the project came to nothing. It's sometimes claimed that the eerie Largo of the "Ghost" Trio (Op. 70 No. 1, composed summer 1808) originated as an idea for this Macbeth project, but there's no evidence for that.

The third of Robert Schumann's Noveletten for solo piano, (Op. 21, 1838) originally bore the epigraph "When shall we three meet again?" and Schumann elsewhere referred to it as a "Macbeth-novelette". (I wonder if the nickname arose because the rhythm of Shakespeare's opening trochees underlies much of the music and emerges into a plain "song without words" at around 0'40", again at 1'30" and to end the piece at 4'15".)

The most famous rendering, of course, is Giuseppe Verdi's 1847 opera Macbeth (Macbetto) ; a thoroughly canonical work in its own right.

Henry Hugh Pierson's apparently remarkable symphonic poem Macbeth (Op. 54, 1859) is programmatic in form, musically representing parts of the drama in ways that might have influenced Wagner. (NB, he is also known as Heinrich Hugo Pierson; he worked and published in Germany.)



In the same year of 1859, Bedřich Smetana (then living in Gothenburg in Sweden) wrote his striking piano sketch "Macbeth and the Witches", performed by Ashley Wass in the video above. (The full title, corrected from Smetana's imperfect Czech, is "Macbeth, skizza ke scéně „Macbeth a čarodějnice“ ze Shakespeara".) [Smetana's residence in Sweden might explain why his famous Vltava theme is so like the beloved Swedish song "Ack Värmland, du sköna"!]

The German composer Joachim Raff (1822 - 1882) wrote an orchestral prelude to Macbeth -- one of four (the others were to The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello). 

Hector Berlioz never wrote any Macbeth music, but he was an ardent Shakespearean and he used the lines beginning "Life's but a walking shadow" as the deathbed epigraph to his Mémoires (1869).

Nearly as well known as Verdi's opera is the first of Richard Strauss' tone poems, Macbeth (Op. 23, 1886-88).



Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote his Macbeth overture for an 1888 production by Sir Henry Irving. (I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected.)




Ernst Mielck (Finnish composer, 1877-1899) wrote an Ouverture zu Macbeth (Op. 2, 1896); his four-year composing career ended when he died of TB at 22.  (NB The stupendous painting is by John Martin, from 1820.)

Ernest Bloch's opera Macbeth was performed in 1910; the earliest sketches are from 1904.

A card party in Leipzig, c. 1887: Nina and Edvard Grieg, Johan Halvorsen, Frederick Delius, Christian Sinding

Johan Halvorsen (Norwegian composer, 1864-1935) wrote incidental music for Macbeth in 1920.

Dmitry Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) is based on Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novella, and is only distantly connected with Shakespeare's play (the sexually attractive murderess of the title is part of a graphically Zolaesque portrait of provincial life). Leskov was himself alluding to Turgenev's story "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District" (first published 1849, collected in A Hunter's Sketches in 1852): Mtsensk is 10km south of Turgenev's childhood home Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. (Turgenev's protagonist isn't much like Hamlet, either.)

Jacques Ibert (French composer, 1890 - 1962) wrote sinisterly playful music for Orson Welles' 1948 film of Macbeth. 

Geraldine Mucha (1917 - 2012, Scottish composer who lived in Prague) wrote music for a Macbeth ballet in 1965: the excellent suite is one of her best-known works. 

These notes on Shakespeare: Full list