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The main theme of Macbeth, the destruction when
ambition goes unchecked by morals—finds its most powerful expression in the
play’s two main characters. Macbeth is a courageous Scottish general who is
not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet he deeply desires power and
advancement. One of Shakespeare’s most forcefully drawn female characters,
Lady Macbeth spurs her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges him to
be strong in the murder’s aftermath, but she is eventually driven to
insanity by the effect of Macbeth’s repeated bloodshed on her conscience. In
each case, ambition—helped, of course, by the malign prophecies of the
witches—is what drives the couple to ever more terrible atrocities. The
problem, the play suggests, is that once one decides to use violence to
further one’s quest for power, it is difficult to stop. There are always
potential threats to the throne—Banquo, Fleance, Macduff—and it is always
tempting to use violent means to dispose of them.
Macbeth is first heard in the wounded captain’s
account of his battlefield valor. He gives us an impression of a brave and
capable warrior. This perspective is complicated, however, once we see
Macbeth interact with the three witches. We realize that his physical
courage is joined by an ambition and a tendency to self-doubt of the
prediction that he will be king. This brings him joy, but it also creates
inner turmoil. These three attributes: bravery, ambition, and self-doubt
struggle for mastery of Macbeth throughout the play. Shakespeare uses
Macbeth to show the terrible effects that ambition and guilt can have on a
man who lacks strength of character. We may classify Macbeth as irrevocably
evil, but his weak character separates him from Shakespeare’s great
villains: Iago in Othello, Richard III in Richard III, Edmund
in King Lear who are all strong enough to conquer guilt and
self-doubt. Macbeth, great warrior though he is, is ill equipped for the
psychic consequences of crime.
Before he kills Duncan, Macbeth is tortured by worry and
almost stops the crime. It takes Lady Macbeth’s steely sense of purpose to
push him into the deed. After the murder, however, her powerful personality
begins to disintegrate, leaving Macbeth increasingly alone and frustrated.
He fluctuates between fits of fevered action, in which he plots a series of
murders to secure his throne, and moments of terrible guilt (as when
Banquo’s ghost appears) and absolute pessimism (after his wife’s death, when
he seems to yield to despair). These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension
within Macbeth: he is at once too ambitious to allow his conscience to stop
him from murdering his way to the top and too conscientious to be happy with
himself as a murderer. As things fall apart for him at the end of the play,
he seems almost relieved with the English army at his gates, he can finally
return to life as a warrior, and he displays a kind of reckless courage as
his enemies surround him and drag him down. In part, this stems from his
fatal confidence in the witches’ prophecies, but it also seems to derive
from the fact that he has returned to the arena where he has been most
successful and where his internal turmoil need not affect him, the
battlefield. Unlike many of Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes, Macbeth never
seems to contemplate suicide: “Why should I play the Roman fool,” he asks,
“and die / On mine own sword?” (Act V, Scene x, L1-2). Instead, he goes down
fighting, bringing the play full circle: it begins with Macbeth winning on
the battlefield and ends with him dying in combat.
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and
frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already
plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, and more
ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she
will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes
that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself. This theme of the
relationship between gender and power is the key to Lady Macbeth’s
character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a
female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence.
Shakespeare, however, seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut
Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males”
(Act I, Scene vii, L73-74). These crafty women use female methods of
achieving power and further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play
implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny
them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.
Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband with remarkable
effectiveness, overriding all his objections. When he hesitates to murder,
she repeatedly questions his manhood until he feels that he must commit
murder to prove himself. Lady Macbeth’s remarkable strength of will persists
through the murder of the king. It is she who steadies her husband’s nerves
immediately after the crime has been perpetrated. Afterward, however, she
begins a slow slide into madness just as ambition affects her more strongly
than Macbeth before the crime, so does guilt plague her more strongly
afterward. By the close of the play, she has been reduced to sleepwalking
through the castle, desperately trying to wash away an invisible bloodstain.
Once the sense of guilt comes home to roost, Lady Macbeth’s sensitivity
becomes a weakness, and she is unable to cope. Significantly, she
(apparently) kills herself, signaling her total inability to deal with the
legacy of their crimes.
Throughout the play, the witches referred to as the weird
sisters by many of the characters, lurk like dark thoughts and unconscious
temptations to evil. In part, the mischief they cause stems from their
supernatural powers, but mainly it is the result of their understanding of
the weaknesses of their specific interlocutors they play upon Macbeth’s
ambition like puppeteers.
The witches’ beards, bizarre potions, and rhymed speech make
them seem slightly ridiculous, like caricatures of the supernatural.
Shakespeare has them speak in rhyming couplets throughout (their most famous
line is probably “Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron
bubble”. (Act IV, Scene i, L10-11), which separates them from the other
characters, who mostly speak in blank verse. The witches ‘words seem almost
comical, like malevolent nursery rhymes. Despite the absurdity of their “eye
of newt and toe of frog” recipes, however, they are clearly the most
dangerous characters in the play, being both tremendously powerful and
utterly wicked (Act IV, Scene i, L14).
The audience is left to ask whether the witches are
independent agents toying with human lives, or agents of fate, whose
prophecies are only reports of the inevitable. The witches bear a striking
and obviously intentional resemblance to the Fates, female characters in
both Greek and
Norse mythology, who weave the fabric of human lives and then
cut the threads to end them. Some of their prophecies seem self-fulfilling.
For example, it is doubtful that Macbeth would have murdered his king
without the push given by the witches’ predictions. In other cases, though,
their prophecies are just remarkably accurate readings of the future. The
play offers no easy answers. Instead, Shakespeare keeps the witches well
outside the limits of human comprehension. They embody an unreasoning,
instinctive evil.
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