Macbeth (2 page)

But should we necessarily think of them as old hags, fairytale witches?
Macbeth
’s source, Holinshed’s “Chronicles 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
(found in the First Folio) 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. The two songs in
Macbeth
(in Act 3 Scene 5 and Act 4 Scene 1) also appear in Middleton’s play
The Witch
. The authorship of the songs seems to be the same as that of the rest of
The Witch
: certain demonic details are borrowed from Reginald Scot’s 1584 treatise
A Discovery of Witchcraft
, an important source for Middleton’s play but not for Shakespeare’s. It is highly probable that the whole of Act 3 Scene 5 and the Hecate portions of Act 4 Scene 1 are Middletonian insertions
in the Shakespearean script. They have the self-contained quality of inserted scenes. They are put in to beef up the witchcraft business and spice the play with a couple of song-and-dance routines. They were probably written after Ben Jonson’s
Masque of Queens
(1609), a short text with chanting hags who are well worth comparing to the revised Shakespeare/Middleton witches. Indeed, the final dance in Act 4 Scene 1 may have used the music and choreography from Jonson’s masque.

The additions represent an excellent example of the practice of altering a theater script to cash in on a new fashion. But the change may have been more than local. As long ago as 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a very interesting observation in a lecture: he said that despite living in an age of witchcraft and astrology, Shakespeare included in his plays no witches. He added the parenthetic note, “for we must not be deluded by stage-directions”—what he had noticed was that the sisters are never actually called “witches” by themselves or the other characters. They are witches in the Folio stage directions but “weyard sisters” in the text. The only person who refers explicitly to a witch is the sailor’s wife reported in Act 1 Scene 3. The first weyard sister is obviously not very pleased with the appellation.

1. “As Macbeth and Banquo journeyed toward Forres … there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of the elder world” (Holinshed’s “Chronicles of Scotland,” 1587).

Are the weyard sisters fair or foul? They are more fair than foul in Holinshed. And in the astrologer Simon Forman’s recollection of the performance of
Macbeth
he saw at the Globe Theatre in 1611, they are described as “fairies or nymphs,” which also sound more fair than foul. The sense of their foulness derives principally from the Middletonian witch-scenes. Banquo’s description in Act 1 Scene 3 suggests physical foulness, but his language is characterized primarily by bafflement as to the sisters’ appearance. Could they initially have been fair ladies giving apparently fair but in fact foul prophecies? Whatever their appearance, it is significant that they foretell rather than control. In Shakespeare’s original text, the sisters may have been morally ambiguous creatures who do nothing more than give voice to mysterious and equivocal “solicitings,” oracular prophecies. Middleton may then have converted them into the kind of overtly evil singing and chanting witches who had appeared in Jonson’s
Masque of Queens
and about which he wrote his own
The Witch
. He also doubled their number and brought on Hecate and assorted attendant spirits, including one in the shape of a cat. Crude practitioners of black magic, they are unequivocal almost to the point of comedy. This said, we should not necessarily dismiss Middleton’s contributions as “spurious interpolations”: they are the product of the play’s evolving life in the Jacobean theater.

Shakespeare’s sisters are elusive and equivocal. They are more like classical Fates than vernacular witches. The term “weird” at this time referred specifically to the Fates and the power of prophecy. In order to suggest something of this nature, and to avoid the modern vernacular associations of “weird,” our text adopts the Folio-based spelling “weyard,” suggesting “wayward, marginal.” The sisters are women on the edge: between society and wilderness, culture and nature, the realm of the body-politic and the mysteries of the hieratic.

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 king was 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’s theory of kingship was the idea that royal succession was divinely ordained rather than achieved arbitrarily through a struggle between rival candidates or through 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 onstage. 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 “backstory” 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 bit part 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 seeds 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 having “given suck” and of knowing “how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me”: 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 channeled all his creative powers not into a family but into his work, his theater 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?

The forms of Shakespeare’s verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme features only as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but “run on” (a feature known as “enjambment”): instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, the
sense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines (where they are known as the “caesura” and where their placing varies). Much more often than in the early plays, a single line of verse is shared between two speakers. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument: the iambic beat is broken up, there is often an extra (“redundant”) unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (known as a “feminine ending”). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended. The iambic pentamenter is the ideal medium for dramatic poetry in English because its rhythm and duration seem to fall in naturally with the speech patterns of the language. In its capacity to combine the ordinary variety of speech with the heightened precision of poetry, the supple, mature Shakespearean “loose pentameter” is perhaps the most expressive vocal instrument ever given to the actor.

Open the text of
Macbeth
at random and you are guaranteed almost immediately to find a strong example of this loose pentameter. In a first test of this claim, the script fell open at the end of Act 5 Scene 5. A messenger brings news of Birnam Wood: “Within this three mile may you see it coming: / I say, a moving grove.” The announcement ends on an abrupt half line, so Macbeth speaks the other half:

As if in imitation of what is being said, Shakespeare makes the verse “hang alive” at the line ending: instead of a deadening end-stop, there is the most momentary pause before we tumble headlong into the next line. The heavy pause then comes in the very middle of the line (after the fifth syllable, not the more customary fourth or sixth). When he turns away from the messenger, Macbeth goes into meditative mode. He soliloquizes even though he is not alone:

The flow of his thought is enacted in the running on of the lines: “begin / To doubt,” “the fiend / That lies.”

Always in Shakespeare, metrical innovation goes alongside verbal invention: “cling thee” is what you would expect a lover to do, not starvation. Simile and metaphor are among the key building blocks of his poetry. “Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?” Lady Macbeth chides her husband, “And wakes it now, to look so green and pale?” The waking image is a superbly accurate imagining of a severe hangover. The ingenuity of the comparison comes from the application of something so physical as the bodily symptoms of a hangover to something so psychological as the idea of “hope.” We are eased into the physicality by “dressed.” Clothing is one of the similes through which the play repeatedly embodies abstractions that denote social status:

And:

Metaphors are usually most powerful when they link things from very different frames of reference; for instance, the amplitude of “life” itself and the confinement of “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more.” Within this metaphor there are further configurations of multiple meaning: “poor” simultaneously suggests “mere,” “ill-paid,” and “unskillful,” while “frets” suggests “wears out,” “worries his way through,” and “rants.” But when Macbeth begins to doubt the “equivocation
of the fiend”—at this point he is with his last remaining follower, who rejoices in the name of “Seyton” (a dark pun: the name may be pronounced “Satan”)—he comes up with a simile that links things from the
same
frame of reference: “That lies like truth.” To lie and to tell the truth at one and the same time: that is true equivocation, literally the vocation—the voicing—of things that are equal but opposite.