Macbeth Aim Higher

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 A Critical Analysis of Macbeth
For each reading, make your own Cornell notes and consider the following:

• Where are these ideas evidenced within the text?

• To what extent do I agree or disagree with the ideas put forward?
• What further questions does this leave me with and where could I explore possible answers?
• Can I use these ideas to link to any of the other texts that I study?

REDUCE- key words or WRITE NOTES- bullet point ideas as you read
questions from your
notes

NOTE SUMMARY
 Psychoanalytical Criticism: Karin Thomson, Shakespeare Institute

The following essay deals with the effects of repressed emotion on the conscious and unconscious
states of Lady Macbeth. In doing so it explores the motives behind the actions of the two central
characters. An analysis of Lady Macbeth's repressed emotional complexes throws light [IV .iii.208-1
0] Lady Macbeth shows a "false face" to everyone, including herself. Her true self is only revealed
in an unconscious state -in her sleep and her eventual somnambulistic state. With a great strength of
will, Lady Macbeth dominates the situation in her waking state to achieve her obsessive ambition for
her husband. In the preparation for the murder she is cool and calculating, manipulating her
husbands will to the extent of her own. She redefines manliness for him as the ability to be
unfeelingly brutal and goads him into proving this to her. The sexual energy involved in her
persuasion is evident in her language. This energy is sublimated into ambition and culminates with
Duncan's murder and the bloody rebirth of Macbeth as an unnatural son and heir to the throne.

Ambition, in Macbeth's case, develops into criminality and like an uncontrollable force destroys
the better part of him as the play progresses. He is described as "valiant cousin" and "worthy
gentleman " in the first scene, after the brutal murder of the king's enemies. However, his reaction
to the witches’ prophecy betrays a rather more devious nature. The witches instigate the tragedy by
stimulating Macbeth's unconscious wish to be king. Macbeth starts with horror because he is torn
between private ambitions and his public face. He wants to be considered valiant and worthy, but
he also wishes to be king. The witches have offered this wish. Banquo, by contrast, is innocent of
Macbeth's darker thoughts, and questions: "why do you start, and seem to fear Things that do sound
so fair?" [I.iii. 50-51 ] Macbeth is already 'rapt' by a daydream of himself as king, which he passes on
to his wife. His abilities, his power and skill as a bloodthirsty warrior are about to be turned on a
society which doesn't suspect him. When addressing the king [I.iv .23-27] Macbeth uses words such
as "service..loyalty..duties..love.. honour". Thirty lines later he states in an aside "Let not light see my
black and deep desires". Macbeth's unconscious wishes have been brought forward into conscious
thought where they will stay.

Lady Macbeth actively avoids thinking about what she has done. Progressively her unconscious
works on her and betrays her in her dreams. It does not seem accidental that her mental fragility
increases as the bond between husband and wife weakens. Her repressed fears emerge and cause
the somnambulistic state in which she enacts a condensed panorama of her crimes. Lady Macbeth's
predisposition towards daydreaming, the sublimation of her desire for a child and the repression of
her guilt over Duncan's murder lead to this mental state. In her somnambulism Lady Macbeth
repeatedly acts out the events connected to and resulting from Duncan's murder: Macbeth's murder
of Banquo; the murder of Macduffs wife and children; Macbeth's terror at the banquet; the letter of
the witches prophecy. All these events torment her, demonstrating to the audience, not only
repressed guilt at her own crimes, but guilt at helping to create a man who could commit these
crimes. The central symbol of her guilt and fear is the smell and sight of blood. She demonstrates
compulsive neurosis in the continual washing of her hands, which she feels, are contaminated. "A
little water" cannot clear her of the deed which "cannot be undone". Her contamination is of both
body and soul. Awake, Lady Macbeth exhibits emotionless cruelty, while in a somnambulistic state
she shows pity and remorse. Her sleeping personality must be taken as her true one because the
unconscious is uninhibited and uncensored. Her true self is more powerful than the false warrior
queen she plays in her waking hours. She ends in a state, which is neither awake nor asleep. Unable
to live the lie or face the truth, her only escape is death.
 Christian Perspectives on Macbeth Jane Kingsley – Smith Shakespeare Institute University of
Birmingham

Macbeth's struggle with his conscience over the murder of Duncan is not merely an internal drama.
Shakespeare externalises the forces of evil in his creation of the witches. And, whilst there are no
good angels, several characters are described as having some divine function or appealing to God.
Hence, Macbeth dramatises certain Christian beliefs that would have been understood as such by
Shakespeare's contemporaries. Walter Clyde Curry writes: Shakespeare has informed Macbeth with
the Christian conception of a metaphysical world of objective evil. The whole drama is saturated
with the malignant presences of demonic forces; they animate nature and ensnare human souls by
means of diabolical persuasion, by hallucination, infernal illusion, and possession. They are, in the
strictest sense, one element in that Fate which God in His providence has ordained to rule over the
bodies and, it is possible, over the spirits of men. (92-3) The new king for whom Shakespeare wrote
his play, James popularised the idea of such forces of evil in his own work Demonology. Christian
philosophy of the period imagined two opposing realms of good and evil, commanded by God and
the Devil. The manifestation of each power on earth occurred internally in the spirit of man and
externally in the activity of angels and demons. Criticism of Macbeth inevitably centres on the
symbolic battle between good and evil in the play. The characters are lined up on the appropriate
sides. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, for their acceptance of demonic prophecy as well as their bloody
deeds, are posed against the forces of heaven. The latter include most obviously Duncan and
Edward, both 'holy' kings, Banquo who declares 'In the great hand of God I stand' (2.3.129) and
Malcolm and Macduff who restore the kingdom to 'grace'. This structure of evil destroyed is viewed
as an example of God's providence by most Christian critiques. Providence can be seen in the
destruction of the criminal Macbeth; the restoration of Scotland to its rightful heir and the end of
Macbeth's dark reign; but above all, in God's victory against Satan. One question the Christian critic
must answer is why God has not intervened sooner. Macduff grieves at the murder of his family and
asks: 'Did heaven look on/ And would not take their part?' (4.3.225-6).

However, Robert Rentoul Reed argues that God's triumph is all the more impressive in the play
because of this suspense: The bringing by God of a merely wicked man to judgement is worthy
perhaps of a perfunctory glory .If, however, He brings to judgement a wicked man who has usurped,
against God's law, the throne of a kingdom and who, for his own ends, has delivered that kingdom
over to Satanic powers, over which he maintains a nominal command, has God not translated His
otherwise perfunctory glory into a kind of magnificent resurrection, in which is seen His real glory?
Such, at least, is the suggestion of the denouement of this play. (197-8) The argument for divine
providence may also be extended to explain the rise of Macbeth himself J. A. Bryant argues that God
must have 'elected to correct Scotland in some way and prepare it for a much greater role in history
under the treble sceptre of Banquo's descendant, James VI' (171). The reductive implications of this
critical approach are obvious. Macbeth becomes merely a foil to God's greatness or a pawn in the
cosmic battle between good and evil. Christian criticism can offer a more character-based approach
but again, this depends on Biblical allegory. Walker imagines the murder of Duncan as partaking of
the central Christian tragedy, that is, the crucifixion of Christ. Macbeth/Judas describes how
Duncan/Christ: 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, and
pity, like a naked newborn babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless
couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.17-
25) The storm during the night of the murder, the reference to the temple cracking and the linking of
Macbeth with a second Golgotha all reinforce this association. The murder has also been likened to
Cain's fratricide whilst Curry sees the moral degradation of Macbeth following an archetypal pattern
exemplified by Lucifer and Adam. Angel/man's self-love leads him to desire what is denied him by
God. Crucially, it is at this point of turning away from God that man is vulnerable to the influence of
the Devil's agents whether they are witches, demons or the promptings of another human being.
Lady Macbeth's call upon 'murd'ring ministers', 'sightless substances' and 'thick night' to fill her with
'direst cruelty' (1.4.39-53) has often been referred to as a wish for demonic possession.

Macbeth's relationship with evil is similar to that of Marlowe' s Dr Faustus. Macbeth imagines that
he too has sold his soul to the devil for some temporal good: 'mine eternal jewel/ Given to the
common enemy of man' (3.1.68-9). Like Faustus, he is unable to repent. It is in these terms that
Macbeth's decision to embrace evil and to wade in blood is explored. He is a man guilty of self-love
who is influenced by the witches and by his wife to murder Duncan. Having achieved the throne, he
continues in his course, not because of any predestination, but to defy providence which will give his
crown to Banquo's heirs. Moreover, Reed argues that Macbeth's increasingly bloody acts are a
deliberate attempt to silence his conscience but also to destroy his moral nature, which manifests
his bond with God. Macbeth struggles to become an enemy to providence and to God himself.

There are a number of obvious limitations to this critical perspective. It cannot explain why an
audience will identify with the murdering, 'hell-hound' Macbeth (for an excellent analysis of this
imaginative sympathy sees Robert B. Heilman's 'The Criminal as Tragic Hero'). Furthermore,
Macbeth and his wife are inevitably reduced to puppets, either literally possessed by evil spirits or
subject to the great operation of divine providence. Neither of these perspectives allows for the
complexity of Macbeth's characterisation nor for his own lack of religious guilt. He does not show
any repentance at the end nor does he recognise his crimes as crimes against God, which the
morality play certainly required (see Morris). It might also be argued that although there are a
number of important Biblical allusions here these do not add up to an equal battle between good
and evil. The latter is a far more powerful and immediate force in the play.
 Macbeth and Feminism Dr. Caroline Cakebread Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a tragedy that embodies the polarities of male and female power, a play
which seems to dramatize the deep divisions that characterize male-female relationships in all his
plays. As Janet Adelman writes, "In the figures of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the witches, the play
gives us images of a masculinity and a femininity that are terribly disturbed." At the same time,
critics have tended to discuss the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in a way that
further highlights this division, viewing Macbeth as a victim of overpowering feminine influences
that characterize the world around him, from the appearance of the bearded Witches at the
beginning of the play, to the presence of Lady Macbeth throughout. Sigmund Freud writes of Lady
Macbeth, that her sole purpose throughout the play is "that of overcoming the scruples of her
ambitious and yet tender-minded husband...She is ready to sacrifice even her womanliness to her
murderous intention...”

For many feminist critics, however, the opinion of Freud and other critics that Macbeth is merely a
victim of feminine plotting is an unsatisfactory response to this play. On the most basic level, it is
Macbeth who actually murders the king while Lady Macbeth is the one who cleans up the mess. A
more fruitful approach would be a closer examination of the different types of women who are
being represented throughout the play, rather than viewing the women en masse, as part of a
dark and evil force "ganging up" on Macbeth. Indeed, feminist criticism can help to point the way
towards a clearer understanding of the sort of society Shakespeare is portraying in this tragedy.
Terry Eagleton points out his belief that "the witches are the heroines of the piece", As the most
fertile force in the play, the witches inhabit an anarchic, richly ambiguous zone both in and out of
official society; they live in their own world but intersect with Macbeth's. They are poets,
prophetesses and devotees of female cult, radical separatists who scorn male power . For
Eagleton, the witches, existing on the fringes of society, are not necessarily the "juggling fiends"
(5.7.49) that Macbeth professes them to be at the end of the play. Instead, as feminist critics, we
might well ask ourselves about the brutal nature of the society in which Macbeth is living and the
effects that traditional labels of "masculinity" and "femininity" have on that society. The nature of
gender roles in Macbeth--a play which is ostensibly about the exchange and usurpation of political
authority amongst men--is brought to the fore at the very beginning of the play, in the figures of the
three Witches in Act One, scene one: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" (1.1.12) they tell us. Marilyn
French points out the role of the Witches in establishing what she sees as the dynamic of ambiguity
that will characterize gender relationships throughout the play. As she writes: They are female, but
have beards; they are aggressive and authoritative, but seem to have power only to create petty
mischief. Their persons, their activities, and their song serve to link ambiguity about gender to moral
ambiguity. The witches challenge our assumptions about masculine and feminine attributes from the
very start, with their beards and their prophecies. In juggling with the contradictory values of fair
and foul, they call into question the moral systems and standards upon which this play will operate.
Shakespeare's witches exist on the fringes of a society in which feminine attributes denote
powerlessness and destruction (Duncan, Lady Macduff) and in which traditionally masculine
values are equated with power.

Indeed, Macbeth's first appearance, covered with blood and receiving high praise for the slaughter
of others, gives us our first idea about the acceptable patterns of behaviour, which govern the
"masculine" side of this world: For brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name!-- Disdaining
fortune, with his brandished steel Which smoked with bloody execution, Like valour's minion Carved
out his passage till he faced the slave, Which ne'er shook hands nor bade farewell to him Till he
unseamed him from the nave to th' chops, And fixed his head upon our battlements. (1.2.16-23)
Macbeth receives the title of "brave Macbeth" amongst his peers for his role as butcher and killing
machine. His ruthlessness is welcomed as valorous and wins him the accolades of his male peers.
Thus, masculine power in the play, the society represented by Duncan, is more like the world of
"juggling fiends" to which Macbeth links the witches when they cease to be of use to him at the end
of the play.

Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the
toe, top-full Of direst cruelty. (1.5.39-42) As Macbeth's "partner of greatness"(1.5.10), Lady
Macbeth's "sacrifice of her womanliness" to echo Freud--"unsex me here"--further highlights the
importance of the acceptance of traditionally masculine qualities in order to achieve power in the
play. "Come to my woman's breasts/ And take my milk for gall"( 1.5.46-47) she asserts, reinforcing
the fact that she is trading her traditional feminine role as mother and nurturer in exchange for a
power which accords with the violent, masculine world of which her husband is a part. In this world,
femininity is not an attribute to be equated with power and, in the murder of Duncan (a king whom
Janet Adelman describes as weak and ineffectual), feminine attributes lead to virtual erasure in
terms of power politics. Here, there is no place for vulnerability. 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 plucked my
nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I sworn As you have done to this.
(1.7.54-59) Lady Macbeth, in moving from nurturing mother to infanticide, represents a shift from
the passive “milky" masculinity she associates with the weak men in the play to a power position
which resonates with a sense of maternal evil. While this is one of the most disturbing points in the
play, it also marks the crossing of a divide between male and female power, a transgression which is
marked by such violent and disturbing imagery.

In the murder of Duncan, Macbeth also highlights the violent nature of male-female divisions,
especially, as Janet Adelman points out, in envisioning himself as a Tarquin figure in approaching the
sleeping king: "..thus with his stealthy pace,/With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his
design/Moves like a ghost" (2.1...). Tarquin, the rapist, the violator of female innocence, becomes
Macbeth, the killer of kings and usurper of power. Here, power relationships amongst men pivot
upon images of male sexual aggression and violence.

At the end of this play, power will be assumed by a man who is not born of any woman, as the
witches prophesy: "for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth" (4.1.94-95). This prophesy is
misread by Macbeth and yet it is extremely telling, since it predicts the complete eradication of
female power which will ensue at the end of the play, with Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff dead.
Now widowed, Macduff, who was born by caesarean section, is a man with no mother, especially
since a caesarean birth in Shakespeare's time inevitably led to the death of the mother. In the end, it
is in the divide between male and female worlds in Macbeth that the nucleus of tragedy lies.
 New Historicist Criticism: Macbeth and Power Wiatt Ropp Shakespeare Institute University of
Birmingham

Stripped of Shakespeare's poetic style and skilful characterization, Macbeth is revealed as little more
than a petty tyrant. Like Machiavelli's Prince, Macbeth seeks power as an end in itself and sees any
means as justified provided it helps him achieve his goal. It is a standard image of power: an
individual, or small group, occupying a position of authority from which he (seldom she) attempts to
force his will upon others. Today's equivalent of a feudal monarch is the power-hungry politician,
the cult leader, or the ruthless business tycoon.

But the new historicist conception of power is different; rather than being a top-down affair that
originates from a specific place or individual, power comes from all around us, it permeates us, and
it influences us in many subtle and different ways. This idea of decentralized power, heavily
indebted to post-structuralist philosophy (see Derrida and Foucault), is sometimes difficult to
understand because it seems to have an intangible, mystical quality. Power appears to operate and
maintain itself on its own, without any identifiable individual actually working the control levers. This
new historicist notion of power is evident in Macbeth in the way in which Macbeth's apparent
subversion of authority culminates in the re-establishment of that same type of authority under
Malcolm. A ruthless king is replaced with another king, a less ruthless one, perhaps, but that is due
to Malcolm's benevolent disposition, not to any reform of the monarchy. Similarly, the subversion of
the play's moral order is contained, and the old order reaffirmed, by the righteous response to that
subversion. In other words, what we see at the beginning of the play--an established monarch and
the strong Christian values that legitimize his sovereignty--is the same as what we see at the end of
the play, only now the monarchy and its supporting values are even more firmly entrenched thanks
to the temporary disruption. It is almost as if some outside force carefully orchestrates events in
order to strengthen the existing power structures.

Consider, for example, a military leader who becomes afraid of the peace that undermines his
position in society. In response to his insecurity, he creates in people's minds the fear of an
impending enemy--whether real or imaginary, it doesn't matter. As a consequence of their new
feelings of insecurity, people desire that their leader remain in power and even increase his power
so that he can better defend them from their new II enemy. II The more evil and threatening our
enemies are made to appear, the more we believe our own aggressive response to them is justified,
and the more we see our leaders as our valiant protectors (Zinn,Declarations of Independence 260-
61,266). Military or political power is strengthened, not weakened, when it has some kind of
threatening subversion of contain ( Greenblatt 62-65).

The important point about the new historicist notion of power, however, is that it is not necessary
for anyone to orchestrate this strengthening of authority. Duncan certainly doesn't plan to be
murdered in order that the crown will be more secure on Malcolm's head after he deposes Macbeth.
The witches can be interpreted as manipulating events, but there is nothing to indicate that they are
motivated by a concern to increase the power and authority of the Scottish crown. It is not
necessary to believe in conspiracy theories to explain how power perpetuates itself; the circular and
indirect, rather than top-down, way in which power operates in society is enough to ensure that it is
maintained and its authority reinforced.

The theatre illustrates this point in that the Renaissance theatre--its subject matter, spectacle,
emphasis on role-playing--drew its energy from the life of the court and the affairs of state--their
ceremony, royal pageants and progresses, the spectacle of public executions (Greenblatt 11-16). In
return, the theatre helped legitimate the existing state structures by emphasizing, for example, the
superior position in society of the aristocracy and royalty. These are the class of people, the theatre
repeatedly showed its audience, who deserve to have their stories told on stage, while common
people are not worthy subjects for serious drama and are usually represented as fools or
scoundrels. Revealing the inherently theatrical aspects of the court and affairs of state runs the risk
of undermining their authority--if people on stage can play at being Kings and Queens, lords and
ladies, then there is always the possibility that the audience will suspect that real Kings and Queens,
lords and ladies, are just ordinary people who are playing a role and do not actually deserve their
position of wealth and privilege.

Within the walls of the theater, it is acceptable to mock the actor playing a king, but never the king
himself; it is acceptable to contemplate the murder of a theatrical monarch, but never a real one.
Macbeth deals with the murder of a king, but Shakespeare turns that potentially subversive subject
into support for his king, James I. Queen Elizabeth died without a direct heir, and a - power vacuum
is a recipe for domestic turmoil or even war. The consequences of Macbeth's regicide and tyranny
illustrate the kinds of disruption that were prevented by the peaceful ascension to the throne of
James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots. The "good king" of England ( 4.3 .147) who gives Malcolm
sanctuary and supports his cause as the rightful successor to the Scottish crown is an indirect
reference to James I. Macbeth is about treason and murder, but Malcolm's description of the noble
king (147-59), and the stark contrast between him and Macbeth, reinforces the idea that good
subjects should see their king as their benefactor and protector.

Shakespeare was not coerced into flattering his king. There was official censorship in his time, but it
is unlikely that he needed anyone to tell him what he could or could not write; he knew the types of
stories that were acceptable to authority and desirable to his paying public. Whether or not
Shakespeare felt constrained by these limitations, or even consciously recognized them, is not the
point; the point is that he worked within a set of conventions and conditions which relied upon and
reinforced the governing power relations of his time, and so there was no need for him to be
manipulated by a government censor looking over his shoulder. If Shakespeare had not known the
boundaries of the acceptable, or had not conformed to the demands of power, he would never have
become a successful playwright. According to new historicism, our own relationship to power is
similar to that of Shakespeare's: we collaborate with the power that controls us. Without
necessarily realizing what we are doing, we help create and sustain it, thus reducing the need for
authority figures to remind us what to do or think. Once we accept the cultural limitations imposed
on our thought and behaviour, once we believe that the limits of the permissible are the extent of
the possible, then we happily police ourselves.
 ON THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE IN MACBETH

by Thomas de Quincey
The following essay was originally published in Miscellaneous Essays. Thomas de Quincey. Boston: Ticknor and Fields,
1865. pp. 9-15.

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was
this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my
feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back
upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately
I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could
see why it should produce such an effect.

Murder, in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the
murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it
flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life;
an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same
in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct, therefore,
because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of 'the
poor beetle that we tread on,' exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating
attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He
must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him; (of course I
mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are
made to understand them--not a sympathy of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person, all
strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one
overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him 'with its petrific mace.' But in the
murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great
storm of passion -- jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred -- which will create a hell within
him; and into this hell we are to look.

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation,
Shakespeare has introduced two murderers; and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably
discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the
tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her -- yet, as both
were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally
to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to
make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, 'the
gracious Duncan,' and adequately to expound 'the deep damnation of his taking off,' this was
to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i.e.,
the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom
utterly withdrawn from man -- was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had
taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in
the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under
consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. If the reader has ever
witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the
most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the
recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast
metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his
grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in
the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep
interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man -- if all at once he should hear
the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and
making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment
was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and
affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are
suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made
apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the
retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart, was to be expressed and
made sensible. Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the
region of the human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady
Macbeth is 'unsexed;' Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to
the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be
conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a
time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated -- cut off by an
immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs -- locked up and
sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is
suddenly arrested -- laid asleep -- tranced -- racked into a dread armistice; time must be
annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep
syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when
the work of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds; the knocking at the
gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human
has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the
re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly
sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of
art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the
flowers -- like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied
with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be
no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert -- but that, the further we press in our
discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where
the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!
Michael Fassbender: 'Macbeth suffered
from PTSD'
The star of Justin Kurzel’s version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy tells
the Cannes film festival that the warrior-turned-murderer’s treachery is
the result of battle fatigue

Henry Barnes

Sat 23 May 2015 12.14

The murderous treachery of Macbeth would today be diagnosed as the result of post-
traumatic stress disorder, Michael Fassbender told the press at the Cannes film festival.

The actor, who plays Shakespeare’s tragic warrior in a new film adaptation by Australian
film-maker Justin Kurzel, said the director helped him realise it was the cumulative effect of
months of grisly battle that drives Macbeth to murder his king after the war is over.

“Never did it occur to me before this that this character was suffering from PTSD,” he said.
“You have a soldier who’s engaged in battle month-after-month, day-after-day. Killing with
his hands. Pushing a sword through muscle and bone. And if that doesn’t work picking up a
rock and using that”.

Kurzel’s version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy opens with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth,
played by Marion Cotillard, laying one of their children to rest. In a subsequent battle scene
Macbeth is shown hallucinating images of the witches that will deliver the prophesy that
predicts his tyrannical path to power.

“We know from soldiers today coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan that they have these
hallucinations,” Fassbender said. “You could be walking down the Croisette here and then
it’s Basra. All of a sudden it’s Basra”.

Macbeth is Kurzel’s second feature after Snowtown, the director’s take on the Snowtown
“bodies-in-barrels” murders, which were committed in Australia during the 1990s. His
version of the Assassin’s Creed video game, for which he will re-team with Fassbender and
Cotillard, is in pre-production. Kurzel said he was keen to avoid his version of Macbeth being
lead by previous adaptations of Shakespeare’s text.

“I was reading that a production of Macbeth is made every four years,” he said. “If that’s so
it’s one of the biggest blockbusters out there”

He said his version is less about the unchecked ambition of a ruthless husband and wife and
more about a couples’ grief.

“[It’s about] how you replace something you’ve lost,” he said. I’ve experienced that in my
own life. I was very interested in how desparate you can be to fill a hole left by grief”.

Cotillard, the French Oscar-winner who’s in Cannes for a fourth consecutive year, said that
she found playing Lady Macbeth in English with a Scottish accent difficult. She said it was
hard to be swept away by a character who lives in a world where “all is gloom”.
“She grapples with her fears and that turns her into a bit a monster,” she said. “There’s a lot
of love between these two characters but they’re just too damaged to allow in anything
luminous”.

The film, financed by StudioCanal and FilmFour, was shot partly in Scotland. Kurzel said the
Scottish countryside “eats you up”, noting that at one point Cotillard had, indeed, been
swallowed by a boghole. When asked what the worst and best things about shooting in
Scotland were Fassbender replied: “Whisky and whisky”.

An excerpt from an interview with Kurzel regarding playing the part of Macbeth:

Just as you say, it’s not only the killing of many people: you have a soldier that’s
engaged in battle month in, month out, day after day, but the fact that his battle
takes place with his bare hands. I mean, the sword is the weapon of choice and
what it takes to pierce someone’s skin, drive the sword through somebody’s
muscle, break through their bone and then take the sword out again and, if the
sword fails, pick up a rock, smash someone’s skull. Those kind of images, definitely
I tried to dig up and explore to try and find that fractured character right at the
beginning.
The idea that he is seeing hallucinations; we know from soldiers today coming back
from Iraq or Afghanistan that describe post traumatic stress disorder and the fact
that they have these hallucinations. They can be walking down the Croisette here
and next thing it’s Basra, and it’s real time Basra. So that made so much sense from
the beginning with the character. The fact that, is he seeing the witches? Are they
there? Are they not? And his sort of unhinged behaviour.
 BRITISH LIBRARY ‘Unsex Me Here’: Lady
Macbeth’s ‘Hell Broth’
• Article by:Sandra M. Gilbert
• Themes:Tragedies, Gender, sexuality, courtship and marriage
• Published:15 Mar 2016
Sandra M. Gilbert considers how Lady Macbeth in her murderous ambition
goes beyond prescribed gender roles, but in doing so only succeeds in
monstering herself and becoming a parody of womanhood, until madness
again confines her to feminine helplessness.

Throughout most of literary history, Lady Macbeth – the scheming spouse who plots the
villainy at the centre of Shakespeare’s devastating ‘Scottish play’ – has been seen as a
figure of ‘almost peerless malevolence’. Monstrous and murderous, she was based on a
woman described in Holinshed’s Chronicles as ‘burning in unquenchable desire to beare the
name of a queene’. Yet actors who played this part have often debated her character. Writing in
the early 19th century, the great Sarah Siddons declared that this infamous heroine was ‘a
woman in whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the characteristics of
human nature’, and recalled that she first learned the part ‘in a paroxysm of terror’, so fearful that
the rustling of her own silk dress seemed ‘like the movement of a spectre pursuing me’. But later
in the century the charismatic actor Ellen Terry thought it ‘strange’ that Lady Macbeth should
be seen ‘as a sort of monster’, claiming that ‘I conceive [her] as a small, slight woman of
acute nervous sensibility’, who was perhaps ‘not good, but not much worse than many women
you know – me for instance’. The critic Anna Jameson similarly declared that ‘the woman herself
remains a woman to the last’.

From a more recent perspective, however, Lady Macbeth has come to be seen not primarily as a
fiendish avatar of evil but as an incarnation of gender trouble whose efforts to implement her
dreams of power question the sexual hierarchy into which she has been born. Almost her first
words in the play, after she receives her husband’s letter reporting his encounter with the
witches, dramatise the inversion of gender roles that marks her marriage. The hesitant Macbeth
is, she fears, ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ (1.5.17, my italics) for his own purposes, and
worse still, hers; his effeminate milkiness suggests that, despite being a dutiful warrior, he’s a
kind of timid ‘milquetoast’. To combat this, Lady Macbeth plans to ‘pour my spirits in thine ear, /
And chastise with the valour of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round’ (1.5.26–
28) of the Scottish crown; literally, she’ll ‘screw his courage to the sticking place’ (1.7.60) by
giving him a good talking-to. But the fantasy, and ultimately the act, of pouring spirits into
someone’s ear, is symbolically masculine, even while in a Shakespearean context, it is
villainous. On the one hand, Lady Macbeth’s plan evokes classic representations of a
passive Virgin Mary impregnated through the ear by the Holy Ghost, or Spirit, of the Lord in
a sort of divine sexual act. On the other hand, her bold (valorous) idea also recalls the poison
murderously poured by Hamlet’s wicked stepfather, Claudius, into the ear of his sleeping brother,
the rightful king. Either way, the lady’s boastful intention signifies her rebellion against the
submissive role to which her culture has assigned her.

Lady Macbeth’s passion to transcend her role as a woman becomes even more explicit in her
famous call to the diabolical ‘Spirits’ (whom her own ‘spirits’ may reflect):

Come,
...
unsex me here,
...
Make thick my blood,
...
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose,
…
Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall … (1.5.40–48, my italics)

Unsexed by her own will, Lady Macbeth is now no longer a conventional ‘lady’: because she has
refused to behave as dutifully as her society suggests she should, she seems to become
an inhuman creature, a dark parody of femaleness whose blood is too ‘thick’ and clotted for
menstrual fertility and whose maternal milk is bitter, dangerous, galling. In unsexing herself she
almost appears to have dehumanised herself and stepped out of ‘nature’ – that is, out of the
natural order of things in which the ‘milk of human kindness’ nurtures moral feeling

In fact, as a diabolical creature Lady Macbeth has aligned herself with the three Weird Sisters,
whose violation of sexual norms (‘you should be women’, says Banquo, ‘And yet your beards
forbid me to interpret / That you are so’) proclaims their witchcraft (1.3.45–47). And just as the
witches cook up the vile ‘hell-broth’ that motivates Macbeth’s treachery (4.1.19), his unnatural
wife stirs up the feast of blood that is the ‘great business’ of the play (1.5.68). Decisively plotting
the implementation of her husband’s fell desire, she advises him to act innocent and ‘Leave all
the rest to me’ (1.5.74). When Macbeth, still wavering, confides his own ambivalence about
murder in an image of maternal tenderness, describing feelings of ‘pity, like a naked new-
born babe’ (1.7.21), she responds with a savage description of a mother’s most unnatural
fantasy, infanticide:

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 boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (1.7.54–59)

Then, once her plans, along with the king and his servants, have been executed, sleep – ‘great
Nature’s second course’ (2.2.36) – is murdered too, and much more of the natural order is
subverted; so much so that darkness blots out daylight, a mere ‘mousing owl’ kills a proud falcon
(2.4.13), and Duncan’s horses – the ‘minions of their race’– turn wild and, incredibly, ‘eat each
other’ (2.4.15–18).

Ironically, Lady Macbeth is often portrayed as accomplishing her purpose by adopting

traditionally ‘feminine’ tricks. Some actors depict her as seductive, luring her husband towards
crime by playing the part of his ‘dearest chuck’ (3.2.45). As the critic Stephen Greenblatt has
noted, too, the Macbeths’ marriage is one of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary
dramatisations of ‘spousal intimacy’, a companionate union in which ‘husband and wife
speak to each other playfully, as if they were a genuine couple’. This representation of
conjugal closeness may help explain the sympathy with which, say, Terry and Jameson
commented on Lady Macbeth’s womanliness. Certainly, as Siddons astutely noted, even after
the two have been overcome by guilt, ‘Unlike the first frail pair in Paradise, they spent not
the fruitless hours in mutual accusation.’ Where Milton’s Adam and Eve blame each other
for the Original Sin that expelled them from Eden, the Macbeths continue to protect each
other, each one eventually suffering in isolation from horrifying remorse.

Indeed, by the end of the play, the couple have been restored to their ‘proper’ gender
roles. Macbeth gains in murderous masculinity, ordering killing after killing like a gangland boss,
including the deaths of the dutifully domesticated Lady Macduff and the ‘pretty ones’ (4.3.216)
who are her children, while Lady Macbeth lapses back into the feminine helplessness she had
earlier rejected. Her loss of control is most theatrically manifested in her guilt-ridden sleep-
walking scene. Here the sleep, whose murder she had commanded, overwhelms her, forcing her
to confess her sins while failing to ‘knit up the ravell’d sleeve of care’ (2.2.34). And though
Macbeth too had wished to purify himself of crime, grandiosely fearing that he could not be
cleansed by ‘all great Neptune’s ocean’(2.2.57), his sleep-walking lady, enacting an obsessive-
compulsive ritual of hand-washing, whimpers that ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
this little hand’ (5.1.50–51). Madness, curiously, forces her back into the stereotypical
femininity that her transgressive yearning for imperial power had repudiated.

Over the years, many efforts have been made to rehabilitate Lady Macbeth. Since the late 20th
century, for instance, as William C Carroll has reported, a number of writers, especially feminists,
have produced prequels or sequels to the play in which the wicked heroine is revealed as a
sympathetic, motherly woman. ‘Perhaps today’s Lady Macbeth needs Women’s Liberation’,
mused the critic Ruby Cohn in 1976, and her comment predicted the appearance of such spin-off
novels as Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008), Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s
Daughter (2009) and R J Hartley and David Henson’s Macbeth: A Novel (2012). It seems
unlikely, however, that any revisionary perfume can sweeten the ‘hell-broth’ of crime and
punishment stirred up by one of Shakespeare’s most unnerving characters.