Macbeth

In brief

Three witches meet Macbeth and Banquo, two Scottish generals, on a heath after a battle. They hail Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor and king to come, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings. The first title arrives at once. Urged by his wife, Macbeth stabs King Duncan while he is a guest in their castle, frames the grooms and takes the crown when Duncan’s sons flee. He has Banquo murdered, though Banquo’s son Fleance escapes, and sees the ghost at his own feast. He goes back to the witches, who tell him that no man of woman born can harm him and that he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. He has Macduff’s wife and children killed. Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep and dies. Malcolm’s soldiers carry branches from Birnam, Macduff turns out to have been “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d” (5.8), and he brings in Macbeth’s head.

The argument

The companion page on Hamlet describes a man who cannot act without proof, and the one on King Lear a man who cannot learn without ruin. Macbeth has neither trouble. He has understood the whole play by its seventh scene. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7), he begins, and he goes on to reason out what will follow: “we but teach / Bloody instructions, which being taught, return / To plague th’ inventor” (1.7). Few murderers in drama act on fuller information, and that is the horror of the play. The witches never tell him to kill anyone. Banquo hears much the same promise and does nothing, and Macbeth himself sees the alternative: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, / Without my stir” (1.3).

What he wants is time, or rather its contents. Lady Macbeth says so when she greets him: “I feel now / The future in the instant” (1.5). The crown turns out to be worth nothing unless it can be passed on: “To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus” (3.1). So he kills in order to secure the years ahead, and each killing removes something from them. By Act 5 he has listed what he has lost, “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends” (5.3), and when his wife’s death is reported he has nowhere to put it: “She should have died hereafter” (5.5). Then comes the speech that follows from everything he has done: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” is a future he owns outright, and it signifies nothing.

The knocking at the gate

Just after the murder someone starts knocking, and Macbeth, with blood on his hands, says “Whence is that knocking?” (2.2). Thomas De Quincey’s essay in the London Magazine of October 1823, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”, starts from a puzzle: why had this sound frightened him since boyhood? His answer, reached by way of the Ratcliff Highway murders, is that for the length of the crime we have been shut inside the murderers’ minds, and the knock announces that ordinary life is coming back. The “re-establishment of the goings-on of the world”, he writes, is what shows us the “awful parenthesis” that had suspended it.

Yet De Quincey does not attend to who goes to the door. A hungover Porter imagines he keeps the gate of hell and admits an imaginary queue, beginning with “a farmer” who hanged himself over a good harvest and “an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven” (2.3). In 1606 this was news. The Gunpowder Plot had been discovered in November 1605. The Jesuit Henry Garnet, who had written a treatise defending equivocation and used the alias Farmer, was tried on 28 March 1606 and executed on 3 May. The allusion is widely accepted, though it cannot settle the date by itself.

The joke also holds the plot in small, since the same trap closes on Macbeth. “I pull in resolution and begin / To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth” (5.5), he says when the wood starts to move, and he dies cursing “these juggling fiends” who “palter with us in a double sense” (5.8).

One short text

Unlike Hamlet and Lear, this play has no quarto to compare. The First Folio of 1623 is the only source. The play is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, a little over half the length of Hamlet, and many critics suspect that what we have is a cut theatre script. The evidence is in small misfits. Macbeth has apparently fought Cawdor’s forces in 1.2 and yet says “the Thane of Cawdor lives” in 1.3. Lennox hears in 3.6 that Macduff has gone to England, while Macbeth has to be told it as news in 4.1. Lady Macbeth’s “What beast was’t then / That made you break this enterprise to me?” (1.7) refers to a conversation the play does not show.

Some of it is almost certainly not by Shakespeare. Two Folio stage directions call for songs by their first words only, “Come away, come away, &c.” (3.5) and “Blacke Spirits, &c.” (4.1). The complete songs are in Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch, which survives in manuscript. Hecate arrives with them, in a different metre, to scold the witches and fly off to the music. It is widely held that her scene and a few lines in 4.1 were added for a later revival, though there is no absolute proof. Gary Taylor went further in the Oxford Middleton of 2007, arguing that Middleton both cut and rewrote the play. Simon Forman saw it at the Globe on 20 April (he wrote 1610, usually corrected to 1611), and his account, the only eyewitness one from the period, does not mention Hecate. He omits much else, so that proves little.

The speed is real, whoever made it. The free text linked here, Project Gutenberg’s #1533, modernises the Folio and is a sound place to start. It also tidies: where the Folio has “weyward Sisters” and “Weyard Sisters”, it prints “weird”, as most editions do.

The king’s ancestor

Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) gave Shakespeare a very different story. There Duncan is a soft and negligent ruler whose gentleness encourages rebellion, and Macbeth has a real grievance when Malcolm is named Prince of Cumberland and his own hopes of the succession are blocked. Macbeth kills the king with accomplices, of whom Banquo is the chief, and then rules for years, at first well. Shakespeare makes Duncan old, gracious and blameless, so that “the old man” with “so much blood in him” (5.1) is a father as well as a king. He moves the killing into Macbeth’s own house, borrowing the guest, the drink and the grooms from Holinshed’s separate account of Donwald and King Duff. And he takes Banquo out of the plot altogether.

The reason is usually thought to be James I, who had come south from Scotland in 1603, had become the patron of Shakespeare’s company and was believed to descend from Banquo. Banquo himself was a fiction, first found in Hector Boece’s history of 1527. James had also written a book on witchcraft, and in 1605 he was greeted at Oxford by three sibyls in a Latin pageant by Matthew Gwinne. The compliment reaches the stage in 4.1, where eight kings file past and a glass shows “twofold balls and treble sceptres”.

Still, the laundering is imperfect, and it makes the better drama. Banquo admits to “cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose” (2.1), and he sees through Macbeth: “and I fear / Thou play’dst most foully for’t” (3.1). He tells no one, and he wonders about the witches: “May they not be my oracles as well” (also 3.1). Shakespeare cleared the king’s ancestor of the murder without clearing him of the wish.

Lady Macbeth’s children

“I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me” (1.7), Lady Macbeth says, in the course of explaining that she would dash its brains out. Yet there is no child in the play, and Macduff, on hearing of the massacre of his family, says “He has no children” (4.3), which may mean Macbeth or Malcolm. A. C. Bradley, in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), gave these matters a note. L. C. Knights’s essay How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933) argued that a Shakespeare play is a dramatic poem, and that treating its people as persons with offstage lives is an error of method.

The title is a brilliant joke, and it is unfair. Bradley’s note says “Whether Macbeth had children or (as seems usually to be supposed) had none, is quite immaterial”, and adds “We cannot say, and it does not concern the play.” The two critics are closer than the legend has it, and I think both miss something. The number does not matter, but the absence does, and it is dramatic as well as verbal. Macbeth’s motive after the murder is dynastic: “Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe” (3.1). He sends killers after Fleance, and then after a small boy whose last line is “He has kill’d me, mother” (4.2). Two of the apparitions are children (4.1), and the man who ends him was never properly born. Cleanth Brooks traced this pattern in “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness” (1947). A man at war with the future ends up killing children, and no biography is needed to see it.

The voices

The witches speak in hammering short lines, “Double, double, toil and trouble” (4.1), and their first paradox, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1), is taken up by Macbeth in his first line, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3), before he has met them. His own speech moves between Latin grandeur and a plain word that lands afterwards: “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (2.2). Caroline Spurgeon noticed how often he wears clothes that do not fit, down to the title hanging loose “like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (5.2).

Lady Macbeth begins in that high style, calling on spirits to “unsex me here” (1.5). She ends in broken prose: “Here’s the smell of the blood still” (5.1). She had said “A little water clears us of this deed” (2.2), and “What’s done is done” (3.2), which returns in her sleep as “What’s done cannot be undone” (5.1).

The people

Macbeth is a killer by profession, praised for splitting a man “from the nave to the chops” (1.2). What separates him from those who praise him is imagination, as Bradley saw. By the end he has “almost forgot the taste of fears” (5.5), and he knows that this is a loss.

Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth has no first name in the play. She carries her “dearest chuck” (3.2) through the murder and the banquet, and is then shut out of what he does next. Malcolm’s closing phrase, “fiend-like queen” (5.8), is the verdict of a winner who never heard her sleepwalk.

Macduff and Malcolm

Macduff leaves his family undefended, and his wife says so: “to leave his wife, to leave his babes” (4.2). Malcolm tests him by slandering himself at length in 4.3, and the restoration that closes the play is competent rather than warm.

Readers and critics

Garry Wills’s Witches and Jesuits (1995) places the play among the dramas that followed the Plot. Janet Adelman’s work on the maternal in Shakespeare reads its dread of women beside its fantasy of a man born without one. Bradley remains worth reading on the play’s atmosphere of darkness and blood.

Afterlives

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) keeps the plot and none of the verse. Toshiro Mifune’s Washizu and Isuzu Yamada’s Asaji move through a feudal Japan shaped by Noh, in its stillness, its masks and its gliding walk, and the forest spirit replaces the witches. Mifune dies under his own archers’ arrows, shot for real. Kurosawa also takes up the old quarrel: Asaji announces that she is pregnant, the news pushes Washizu to kill Miki and Miki’s son, and the child is born dead. The play’s blank is filled in, and the film is stronger for it.

Verdi’s opera came in 1847, and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, after Leskov, in 1934. Orson Welles filmed the play in 1948, Roman Polanski in 1971 and Joel Coen in 2021. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2003) moves it to Mumbai’s underworld.

In theatres it survives as a taboo. Actors say “the Scottish play”, and anyone who names it inside must go out, turn round three times, spit, and ask to be let back in. The tale that a boy playing Lady Macbeth died at an early performance has been traced to a satire by Max Beerbohm, and there is no evidence of a real curse. The disasters on the list, from the Astor Place Riot of 1849 to Harold Norman’s fatal sword wound at Oldham in 1947, are what any much-performed play with sword fights in the dark would collect. It is still a good joke on the play’s own subject, since the word harms only those who believe it.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting. It is built for speed, and it slows down only in 4.3.
Get an edition that discusses the text. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason’s Arden (2015) is the fullest, and Nicholas Brooke’s Oxford is good on staging. The Folger text is free online, as are the Folio at the Internet Shakespeare Editions and Gutenberg #2264.
Read 3.5 aloud. Compare its jog-trot rhyme with the witches of 1.3 and you will hear what the case for Middleton rests on.
Watch the children. Count who is killed or threatened, and who is left alive at the end.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet (about 1600). The prince who cannot act beside the thane who cannot stop.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866). What happens inside a killer afterwards, with a knock at the door of its own.
Thomas Middleton, The Witch (about 1615). The songs in what may be their first home.
Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865). The wife’s story moved to a Russian merchant’s house, with no remorse at all.