Macbeth
 
 By William Shakespeare
 
Macbeth is presented as a mature man of definitely
established character, successful in certain fields of
activity and enjoying an enviable reputation. We must not
conclude, there, that all his volitions and actions are
predictable; Macbeth's character, like any other man's at a
given moment, is what is being made out of potentialities
plus environment, and no one, not even Macbeth himself, can
know all his inordinate self-love whose actions are
discovered to be-and no doubt have been for a long
time-determined mainly by an inordinate desire for some
temporal or mutable good.
 
Macbeth is actuated in his conduct mainly by an inordinate
desire for worldly honors; his delight lies primarily in
buying golden opinions from all sorts of people. But we
must not, therefore, deny him an entirely human complexity
of motives. For example, his fighting in Duncan's service
is magnificent and courageous, and his evident joy in it is
traceable in art to the natural pleasure which accompanies
the explosive expenditure of prodigious physical energy and
the euphoria which follows. He also rejoices no doubt in
the success which crowns his efforts in battle - and so on.
He may even be conceived of the proper motive which should
energize the back of his great deed:
 
"The service and the loyalty I owe, In doing it, pays
itself."
 
But while he destroys the king's enemies, such motives work
but dimly at best and are obscured in his consciousness by
more vigorous urges. In the main, as we have said, his
nature violently demands rewards: he fights valiantly in
order that he may be reported in such terms a "valour's
minion" and "Bellona's bridegroom"' he values success
because it brings spectacular fame and new titles and royal
favor heaped upon him in public. Now so long as these
mutable goods are at all commensurate with his inordinate
desires - and such is the case, up until he covets the
kingship - Macbeth remains an honorable gentleman. He is
not a criminal; he has no criminal tendencies. But once
permit his self-love to demand a satisfaction which cannot
be honorably attained, and he is likely to grasp any
dishonorable means to that end which may be safely
employed. In other words, Macbeth has much of natural good
in him unimpaired; environment has conspired with his
nature to make him upright in all his dealings with those
about him. But moral goodness in him is undeveloped and
indeed still rudimentary, for his voluntary acts are
scarcely brought into harmony with ultimate end.
 
As he returns from victorious battle, puffed up with
self-love which demands ever-increasing recognition of his
greatness, the demonic forces of evil-symbolized by the
Weird Sisters-suggest to his inordinate imagination the
splendid prospect of attaining now the greatest mutable
good he has ever desired. These demons in the guise of
witches cannot read his inmost thoughts, but from
observation of facial expression and other bodily
manifestations they surmise with comparative accuracy what
passions drive him and what dark desires await their
fostering. Realizing that he wishes the kingdom, they
prophesy that he shall be king. They cannot thus compel his
will to evil; but they do arouse his passions and stir up a
vehement and inordinate apprehension of the imagination,
which so perverts the judgment of reason that it leads his
will toward choosing means to the desired temporal good.
Indeed his imagination and passions are so vivid under this
evil impulse from without that "nothing is but what is
not"; and his reason is so impeded that he judges, "These
solicitings cannot be evil, cannot be good." 
 
Still, he is provided with so much natural good that he is
able to control the apprehensions of his inordinate
imagination and decides to take no step involving crime.
His autonomous decision not to commit murder, however, is
not in any sense based upon moral grounds. No doubt he
normally shrinks from the unnaturalness of regicide; but he
so far ignores ultimate ends that, if he could perform the
deed and escape its consequences here upon this bank and
shoal of time, he'ld jump the life to come. Without denying
him still a complexity of motives - as kinsman and subject
he may possibly experience some slight shade of unmixed
loyalty to the King under his roof-we may even say that the
consequences which he fears are not at all inward and
spiritual, It is to be doubted whether he has ever so far
considered the possible effects of crime and evil upon the
human soul-his later discovery of horrible ravages produced
by evil in his own spirit constitutes part of the tragedy.
He is mainly concerned, as we might expect, with
consequences involving the loss of mutable goods which he
already possesses and values highly.
 
After the murder of Duncan, the natural good in him compels
the acknowledgment that, in committing the unnatural act,
he has filed his mind and has given his eternal jewel, the
soul, into the possession of those demonic forces which are
the enemy of mankind. He recognizes that the acts of
conscience which torture him are really expressions of that
outraged natural law, which inevitably reduced him as
individual to the essentially human. This is the
inescapable bond that keeps him pale, and this is the law
of his own natural from whose exactions of devastating
penalties he seeks release:
 
"Come, seeling night...
 And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to
pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale."
 
He conceives that quick escape from the accusations of
conscience may possibly be affected by utter extirpation of
the precepts of natural law deposited in his nature. And he
imagines that the execution of more bloody deeds will serve
his purpose. Accordingly, then, in the interest of personal
safety and in order to destroy the essential humanity in
himself, he instigates the murder of Banquo.
 
But he gains no satisfying peace because his conscience
still obliges him to recognize the negative quality of evil
and the barren results of wicked action. The individual who
once prized mutable goods in the form of respect and
admiration from those about him, now discovers that even
such evanescent satisfactions are denied him:
 
"And that which should accompany old age, As honor, 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."
 
But the man is conscious of a profound abstraction of
something far more precious that temporal goods. His being
has shrunk to such little measure that he has lost his
former sensitiveness to good and evil; he has supped so
full with horrors and the disposition of evil is so fixed
in him that nothing can start him. His conscience is numbed
so that he escapes the domination of fears, and such a
consummation may indeed be called a sort of peace. But it
is not entirely what expected or desires. Back of his
tragic volitions is the ineradicable urge toward that
supreme contentment which accompanies and rewards fully
actuated being; the peace which he attains is
psychologically a callousness to pain and spiritually a
partial insensibility to the evidences of diminished being.
His peace is the doubtful calm of utter negativity, where
nothing matters.
 
This spectacle of spiritual deterioration carried to the
point of imminent dissolution arouses in us, however, a
curious feeling of exaltation. For even after the external
and internal forces of evil have done their worst, Macbeth
remains essentially human and his conscience continues to
witness the diminution of his being. That is to say, there
is still left necessarily some natural good in him; sin
cannot completely deprive him of his rational nature, which
is the root of his inescapable inclination to virtue. We do
not need Hecate to tell us that he is but a wayward son,
spiteful and wrathful, who, as other do, loves for his own
ends. This is apparent throughout the drama; he never sins
because, like the Weird Sisters, he loves evil for its own
sake; and whatever he does is inevitably in pursuance of
some apparent good, even though that apparent good is only
temporal of nothing more that escape from a present evil.
At the end, in spite of shattered nerves and extreme
distraction of mind, the individual passes out still
adhering admirably to his code of personal courage, and the
man's conscience still clearly admonishes that he has done
evil.
 
Moreover, he never quite loses completely the liberty of
free choice, which is the supreme bonum naturae of mankind.
But since a wholly free act is one in accordance with
reason, in proportion as his reason is more and more
blinded by inordinate apprehension of the imagination and
passions of the sensitive appetite, his volitions become
less and less free. And this accounts for our feeling,
toward the end of the drama, that his actions are almost
entirely determined and that some fatality is compelling
him to his doom. This compulsion is in no sense from
without-though theologians may at will interpret it so-as
if some god, like Zeus in Greek tragedy, were dealing out
punishment for the breaking of divine law. It is generated
rather from within, and it is not merely a psychological
phenomenon. Precepts of the natural law-imprints of the
eternal law- deposited in his nature have been violated,
irrational acts have established habits tending to further
irrationality, and one of the penalties exacted is dire
impairment of the liberty of free choice. Thus the Fate
which broods over Macbeth may be identified with that
disposition inherent in created things, in this case the
fundamental motive principle of human action, by which
providence knits all things in their proper order. Macbeth
cannot escape entirely from his proper order; he must
inevitably remain essentially human.
 
The substance of Macbeth's personality is that out of which
tragic heroes are fashioned; it is endowed by the dramatist
with an astonishing abundance and variety of
potentialities. And it is upon the development of these
potentialities that the artist lavishes the full energies
of his creative powers. Under the influence of swiftly
altering environment which continually furnishes or elicts
new experiences and under the impact of passions constantly
shifting and mounting in intensity, the dramatic individual
grows, expands, developes to the point where, at the end of
the drama, he looms upon the mind as a titanic personality
infinitely richer that at the beginning. This dramatic
personality in its manifold stages of actuation in as
artistic creation. In essence Macbeth, like all other men,
is inevitably bound to his humanity; the reason of order,
as we have seen, determines his inescapable relationship to
the natural and eternal law, compels inclination toward his
proper act and end but provides him with a will capable of
free choice, and obliges his discernment of good and evil.