Dusty:

The first act consists of seven relatively short scenes — unusual for a Shakespeare play. Unusual too in how far we get into the plot in the course of the first act. And daring in that it deals with the deliberate killing of a king. Yes, it was in another country, but James I comes from Scotland.

And what a strange beginning to a Shakespeare play! Instead of having a couple of minor characters talk about the principal figure and the problematic situation he’s in, as in Lear, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra, we get three witches — are they just old crones or are they supernatural creatures? — who speak gnomically about their “next” meeting. They have apparently already worked out  — or foreseen — what’s going to happen, some kind of battle which will be both “lost” and “won,” and they plan to meet Macbeth, though for what purpose we aren’t told. I see from the notes in my Arden edition that some critics thought the scene “pointless” and others that it contains the key to the entire play. I agree that especially the last couplet sets the stage. This is a play in which nothing is what it seems: fair is foul, and foul is fair. The atmosphere in the play — its “air” — is indeed “filthy.”

Yes, as scholars say, the witches may be included because James I was interested in witches. But do they serve a dramatist to body forth Macbeth’s as-yet-unexpressed desire and ambition, and serve as an economical way of presenting the evil thoughts in his mind, thoughts he has apparently already expressed to Lady Macbeth? Maybe they are a simple answer to the question, “Where does evil come from?” What would it be like to put on a production of the play without the witches?

In 1.2 we may get a quick example of something that appears “foul” but is in fact “fair”: a “bloody man” — not the only one we will see in this play — suddenly comes in. Maybe there should be a dramatic pause after Duncan’s first words, “What bloody man is that?”, so that the audience can register the scene of horror. But he turns out to bear good news. And he delivers a bombastic speech about “brave Macbeth,” who turns out to be the prime example of “fair” that is in fact “foul.” I’m not quite sure what to make of the Captain’s old-fashioned rhetoric. Presumably it has to do with marking difference — between what Macbeth appears to be and what he is, between an old-style account full of high phrase and title (Bellona’s bridegroom) and an ugly and cold reality where people speak plainly of “murder” and where Macbeth is the bridegroom of a different kind of Bellona. The scene ends with Macbeth promoted to Thane of Cawdor, though he doesn’t know it yet. This sets up the following scene in which he hears it first from the witches and then from Rosse. The final words in the scene — “What he hath lost, noble Macbeth has won” — echo the “lost/won” uttered by the witches.

In 1.3 the witches, as they promised, gather to “meet Macbeth.” Where did Shakespeare get their language, rhymed couplets and short lines? As Macbeth enters with “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” he echoes the witches. Has he already been somehow tainted by them? Has he already harbored unutterable thoughts and “horrible imaginings”? Apparently so, because he “starts” when he is addressed as Thane of Cawdor and “King hereafter.” This is what he has already been imagining. They are things that “sound . . . fair,” but in fact are “foul.”

When the witches “vanish,” I guess we assume them to be not natural but supernatural, as Macbeth does (“this supernatural soliciting”). With the long aside, we are privy to his mind. Again he seems to have internalized the witches’ way of seeing and speaking: “nothing is but what is not” — another short line. But at this point Macbeth is not ready to commit himself to evil. He wants the crown, but is ready and willing to wait for it.

1.4, another brief scene, only 58 lines, is set at Duncan’s court. We hear of the exemplary death of the Thane of Cawdor, declared an evil traitor, but who has a good end, confessing and asking pardon: “Nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it” — a beautiful line. Maybe we will remember this death when Macbeth thinks about dying and about the “careless trifle” of his own life. I was puzzled why Duncan in this scene names Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland and thus his successor — where’s the news when a king names his eldest son as his successor? — but a footnote tells me that this is in fact news, because the  crown was not hereditary. The announcement is dramatically useful, complicating things for Macbeth, who acknowledges even more openly — to himself — his “black and deep desires.” Does he now have to get rid of both Duncan and Malcolm? Duncan turns out to be a self-conscious wit, when he punningly tells “worthy Banquo” that the valiant Macbeth is a “banquet.” We’ll see more banquets before we’re done.

1.5 dramatically presents Lady Macbeth, already revealed to us as ruthless and fully conscious of the evil she proposes. We get no explanation of what has corrupted her, but she has already resolved on murdering the king, violating the “natural” order in every way, including her own nature: “Unsex me here.” [My grandson had to memorize and recite that speech when his seventh grade class read a somewhat simplified version of the play. I am surprised that this speech was retained. I coached him, and he was apparently a great success.] When she addresses “you Spirits,” do we think she is trying to contact Macbeth’s witches? Interesting that Shakespeare imagines her as a mother who has nursed children, but never tells us about any children. Macbeth has too much “milk” [of “human kindness”] and she wants to turn her own to “gall.” We don’t really care how many children she had, but it is significant and more chilling that when she speaks of unmilking herself, she personally knows whereof she speaks. She clearly takes over the scene, just as she has presumably taken over the marriage, directing Macbeth.

1.6 begins with Duncan, who seems to misread everything, commenting on the sweet “air” at the castle. (Even Banquo thinks the “air is delicate.”) We know the air is already poisonous, and “filthy.” It’s significant that it is Lady Macbeth who greets the king upon his arrival, and not Macbeth, who has arrived at the castle before the king. Is it odd that Duncan doesn’t seem to notice that he was not greeted by the host?

1.7 begins with another great speech. [It’s one I chose to memorize in preparation for my week-long written exams at Oxford, when, so I was told, I was expected to be able to quote from a play if I discussed it. I can still produce most of it.] Macbeth’s soliloquy seems to invite comparisons with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” They are both speeches that ask “should I do it?” and then worry about the consequences. By the end of the speech Macbeth has resolved not to “proceed” with what he euphemistically calls “this business.” Lady Macbeth hasn’t heard the soliloquy, but she might as well have. She provides the “spur” to prick Macbeth’s sides. He is quickly on board, even envisaging the bloody event, though the scene and act ends with Macbeth acknowledging his “false heart.”

Michael:

Yes, this is certainly a strange way to begin a play, but dramatically effective, and their parting words — “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” – are an apt epigraph for the play and a good description of what we learn about the battle, and Macbeth and Cawdor, in the ensuing scene. My argument (in a piece I did not too long ago) about the influence of the mystery plays on Sh. made me interested in the sheer amount of blood we see and hear about in the play. The Captain’s report that Macbeth and Banquo were so bloody that they seemed to bathe “in reeking wounds,/ Or memorize another Golgotha” seems to refer to the portrayal of the passion in the mystery plays, which did involve a lot of stage blood. This after the “bloody man” who begins the scene. And then we get the witches again. The first one will curse the seaman who will be denied sleep and become “a man forbid.” And they seem to be waiting for Macbeth. As you point out, Macbeth echoes them in his first line. Banquo notes Macbeth’s physical reaction to the witches’ prophecy of his imminent and future titles. His reaction to the news about Macbeth’s becoming Thane of Cawdor — “can the devil speak true?” – and his comment about instruments of darkness “speaking true” both forecast what’s coming.  And the projected, but still imaginary, murder is comes out in M’s aside.

How did the witches “vanish”? Through that trap door in the center of the stage, or with enveloping smoke — maybe a bit harder to manage.

I too hadn’t thought much about the Scottish succession, but the naming of Malcolm and Macbeth’s later assumption of the kingship seem to suggest something different from primogeniture. Malcolm’s words about Cawdor’s death project a traitor’s “good death,” but what will this mean?  Duncan’s words about the difficulty of knowing a traitor by his face of course becomes prophetic.

Yes, those are some heavy lines for a seventh-grade class, though better maybe than Lady M’s revelation that she has given suck and yet would have dashed her baby’s brains out if she had sworn to do so.

I’m not sure Duncan misreads the delicate air of Macbeth’s castle. Could be that it genuinely did have this delicate and blest air, which is turned hellish by what M and Lady M do? Banquo also celebrates the “bed and procreant cradle” of the “temple haunting martlet,” which will become a version of hell. There is a fascination in the play with nature’s seeming response to human action. The king says he will “plant” Macbeth and make him “full of growing.” Lady M. says the raven is hoarse that croaks Duncan’s entrance under her battlements. And of course later we hear of a destructive storm the night of the assassination.

Macbeth seems full of ambivalence about the murder of Duncan, maybe especially in your Oxford-memorized speech, in which he seems to talk himself out of the assassination. I love the entrance of Lady M, just as he says he has no spur to his intent but only ambition, “which o’erleaps itself/ And falls on the other”: enter Lady M! Her insistence about killing “the babe that milks me” is another of those horrid lines of Sh that makes one wonder at the occasional darkness of his imagination.  In any case she seems to entirely win Macbeth over; you’d think he’d be horrified at her baby-killing lines, but he’s just impressed by her non-feminine nature.

Michael:

Act 2 is the murder, and one of the most dramatically potent scenes I can think of. Banquo’s giving his sword to Fleance seems emblematic of his desire to avoid violence, and he also renounces the sleep that brings dreams of “cursed thoughts.” But then he takes back the sword when he hears Macbeth. Banquo tells him the dark dreams are of the witches, but he wants to avoid much thought about them.

What to make of Macbeth’s air-borne dagger? He sees it as a guide that encourages him to the murder, but it might just as well seem a warning. It’s a dagger created by his own imagination, and I think those film versions that literally create the vision are wrong. The bell, Lady M’s entrance, then Macbeth’s, and the staccato dialogue create a wonderful tension that surround the offstage murder. And there’s the powerful contrast of Macbeth’s account of the murder and Lady M’s. She’s tied to a literal sense of Duncan’s death, and Macbeth exercises his mind and fantasy over it. He speaks of the implications of the guards’ prayers and his inability to respond, of what it means to murder someone who is asleep, of his mistakenly bringing the bloody daggers with him. The only hint of Lady M’s possible qualms was her mention that she would have done the deed herself if Duncan had not resembled her father in his sleep, which of course should have deterred the murder altogether. Macbeth’s lines about the healing properties of sleep are powerfully memorable. And he cannot return to the scene he created, but she can and does. His line about his bloody hands making “The multitudinous seas incarnadine” may well have been stolen from Othello, except that he glosses it in plain English. And his wish that Duncan could be waked with the knocking at the gate suggests regret at what they’ve done.

The porter of hell-gate is one of those wonderful turns in Shakespeare. It appears that it is another of those recollections of the mysteries. There’s a reference to an actor who played the porter of hell gate (at Coventry) in one of the early sixteenth-century interludes (I’m not recalling which at the moment). Coventry was certainly the mystery play that Shakespeare. knew; perhaps he saw it multiple times in his childhood and adolescence. So the porter introduces a sudden comic moment after all the dark tension of the previous scene. Since we don’t have most of the Coventry play, there’s no indication whether it was a comic scene there. It must have been a moment in the harrowing-of-hell play, and the porter was probably attempting to stop the almost risen Christ from entering hell and taking the souls of the just to heaven. Here it suggests, lightly, that Macbeth’s castle is not only cold but also hell. His reference to equivocation suggests that this is all in the shadow of the Gunpowder Plot; do you think this may add a certain frisson to the portrayal of a king’s assassination?

Just before the discovery of Duncan’s murder, Lenox describes a scene of natural chaos in the night that seems to underscore the horror of the assassination. Macduff’s ringing of the alarm bell recalls the earlier bell and increases the tension. What Macbeth speaks about his own response to the death is certainly an act, but in view of his regret may also be true. Of course his follow-up murder of the guards is part of his defense and enables him to seem Duncan’s avenger. Lady M’s faint seems part of the cover-up and may represent her attempt to shut Macbeth up.

Scene 4 continues the theme of nature’s apparent response to the royal murder, Ross and Old Man recounting the various prodigies that have occurred, including Duncan’s horses turning wild and even cannibalistic. It’s a wonderful image of what the human political world has become.

We learn at the end that Macduff will not go to Scone to see Macbeth invested as king. And we never learn why Macbeth succeeds. Malcolm and Donalbain have both fled for their safety, creating suspicion, but we may wonder if Macduff’s words to Ross may suggest suspicion.

Dusty:

Further on Acts 1 and 2.

As for the delicate air at Macbeth’s castle: since Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have already talked, and since Lady M has already had hellish thoughts, wouldn’t they have already darkened the air? If I’m right that this is another case of appearances deceiving, then Banquo is equally misled.

Act 2, with four short scenes, the longest only 146 lines, is again a short act. The action in this play moves right along. No subplot.

In 2.1 we meet Banquo and his son. There are many father/son pairs in this play: Duncan with Malcolm and Donalbain, Banquo with Fleance, and both Siward and Macduff have sons. But, significantly perhaps, Macbeth has no son. He will be king “hereafter” but Banquo will “get” a king.

What should we make of Banquo’s “cursed thoughts” and his sleeplessness? Does he, like Macbeth, have ambitions that involve the death of Duncan? [When I wrote this, I had not yet re-read 3.1.] Yes, the air-borne dagger is imagined, indicating how vividly Macbeth is aware of the “horror” he proposes.  I too wonder about “incarnadine.” It does not sound like Macbeth at all. (I think that line is often misunderstood by readers or listeners who think it is an adjective modifying “seas.”)

In both 2.2 we get ominous knocking and in 2.3 the knocking persists, and is compared by the porter to knocking at hell’s gate, which both confirms our sense that we are in a kind of “hell” and turns it into comedy. Macbeth gets a good look at the sleeping Malcolm and Donalbain: why doesn’t he kill them, since he already knows that one of them stands between him and the throne? As it happens, we quickly discover that Duncan’s sons don’t feel any real “sorrow” for the death of their father — I don’t know why we are given that crucial information — and then flee, thinking that they might be killed next. (Why are the two sons so firmly allied, if Malcolm has already been declared successor? )But I guess they don’t realize that their flight will make them look guilty — and in 2.4 they are indeed suspected — so Macbeth’s path to the throne is cleared.

In 3.1 we learn both that Banquo suspects Macbeth and that he feels somewhat guilty himself for his ambitious thoughts. I had not remembered that in Holinshed, as my Arden footnote tells me, Banquo was Macbeth’s accomplice, but that Shakespeare, writing when Banquo’s descendant is king of England, cannot let that stand. But it would seem that by keeping silent about the greeting from the witches Banquo was a kind of accessory. We also learn both that Macbeth fears Banquo, because he observed Macbeth’s startled reaction to the witches, and because Banquo’s son will be a king. Somehow Macbeth did not get the memo about how succession to the throne of Scotland works. Duncan had earlier seemed to make it clear that it was not automatically passed from father to son, but Macbeth thinks it does, and that his son could not succeed him. Did we know that he has one, or is planning to have one? Then we get an exchange between Macbeth and his hired murderers. Why does it need to be so long? Could it not even be cut? Finally we get Macbeth’s “farewell” to Banquo, which recalls his “farewell” to Duncan at the end of 2.1.

Dusty:

It’s striking that in 3.2 both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth would prefer death to “doubtful joy” and “restless ecstasy.” They cannot tolerate the uncertainty while the “business” is not fully resolved. This recalls “If it were done, when ’tis done,/Then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Maybe this helps to keep the audience engaged with murderers because they are restless and guilty murderers, and that’s what interests us. Why does Macbeth keep to himself, and keep his plans to himself? Lady Macbeth, as my footnote suggests, is here uncharacteristically solicitous.

Could the short 3.3, the murder scene, be cut?

In the banquet scene (3.4) it’s clear that only Macbeth sees the ghost, a product of his imagination, as with the dagger earlier. Presumably he must stand aside during his exchanges with Lady Macbeth, lest the dinner guests hear too much of what he says. Given Lady Macbeth’s repudiation of her gender, and her challenges to Macbeth  in 1.7 (“when you durst do it, then you were a man”) it’s clear that he is here worried about his manliness. She asks “are you a man . . . unmann’d . . .?” and he insists “what man dare, I dare . . . I am a man again.”

I note that editors think 3.5 is a non-Shakespearean interpolation. I think we can sense that by the language of the witches, who speak here in regular tetrameters, unlike the witches in the earlier scenes.

3.6 is a strange scene.  I don’t think Lenox has spoken before. The scene is set no place in particular. It’s almost as if Shakespeare felt he needed to present a little exposition in order to set up the upcoming battle between Macbeth and Macduff. One of my footnotes suggests that there is something chorus-like about Lenox. But the apparent inconsistencies in his speech, declaring first that Macbeth “has borne all things well” and later that he is a “tyrant,” suggest that he begins ironically or even sarcastically and ends speaking without irony. His interlocutor, the unnamed “Lord,” seems to speak without irony and to look forward to a restored country.

Michael:

I retain my sense that the air of Macbeth’s castle is to be understood initially as delicate, that Duncan rightly calls attention to this and Banquo to the “temple-haunting martlet,” that they’re not deceived and that it’s with the murder that Macbeth destroys this salubrious ambience, turning it hellish. Otherwise why call attention to it? And it accords with the way nature itself becomes unnatural, destroyed by the assassination, like Duncan’s prized horses turning wild and cannibalistic.

I feel the play is an exploration of the origin of evil, Macbeth not initially evil since he can explore the reasons why he should not murder his king and comes, initially, to the conclusion that they had best not kill him, in spite of his ambition: “If fate will have me king, then fate may crown me.” But Lady M spurs him on, and Macbeth, once he kills, enters on a cascading, even escalating, series of evil deeds, even as his imagination withers. He had a chance not to do evil, but consciously chose it.

I think Banquo has thoughts and dreams of evil, also coming from the weird sisters, but they are things he consciously rejects, like his handing the sword to Fleance. And he wants to avoid dreaming, since it’s of the weird sisters’ prophecy. Yes, I too like the verbal “incarnadine,” maybe among the last bits of Macbeth’s imaginative mind and language before he loses it all. But it does seem lent from Othello.

I should have called attention to Macduff’s reference to “the great doom’s image” in the dead Duncan. The doom’s image was the final scene, the last judgment, in the mystery plays, when the judging Christ appeared with spectacularly bleeding wounds to judge the world. Malcolm and Banquo are urged the rise from their graves, as would happen at the Last Judgment, to look at the great doom’s image in the bleeding Duncan.

Interesting that the play turns Banquo from accomplice in Holinshed to foil for Macbeth; I hadn’t remembered this either, but it does introduce, in addition to sanitizing James’s ancestor, a figure who can resist the prophecies of the witches, and show that there’s no necessity of evil there.

Yes, Macbeth’s keeping of his plans for Banquo from Lady M is strange, but maybe meant as a manly surprise for her. It also suggests the way their evil requires more evil, that there’s no end to what they’ve begun. The scene ends with some impressive “night poetry” for Macbeth.

3.3 introduces the “third murderer” and illustrates Macbeth’s lack of trust for even the ones he’s engaged. The escape of Fleance may be the significant need, but showing the unequivocal death of Banquo may be what’s necessary for his appearance at the banquet. And his appearance at the banquet introduces more blood: “Never shake /Thy gory locks at me.” It’s interesting that the audience has to figure out that the bloody and bleeding Banquo, who is physically visible to them, isn’t visible to the characters on stage except Macbeth. Film productions that make the ghost of Banquo ghostlike and evanescent get this wrong. Banquo is physically present, even if the other characters can’t see him.

Hecate doesn’t sound very Shakespearean; 3.5 must be one of those scenes that was later interpolated — by Ben Jonson?

Lenox’s irony seems to sum up Macbeth’s trail thus far and suggest that it’s not going over well, and the unnamed lord provides some narrative on what’s in store.

Michael:

Act 4: these witches sound more plausible than Hecate, but then Hecate returns for a moment. The apparitions that follow set up the ironies that will conclude, the bloody child as a baby fresh from Caesarian delivery, the crowned child with a tree, foreshadowing the movement of Birnam Wood. (It’s rather weird that Santa Barbara and Montecito have a golf course by that name at their border; it must have sounded suitably Scottish and right for golf, and no Shakespeareans were around to raise questions.) In the line of eight kings, Banquo is still bloody, “blood-boltered.” Presumably the last one with a mirror reflected King James, who became the ninth? Is this how you understand this? The “antic round” for “this great king” must be a celebration of James, paying welcome to him to the English throne. Macbeth says in his aside that in the future the firstlings of his heart will be the firstlings of his hand: no more overthinking things. First to Macduff’s castle to kill his family.

Then to this very scene, 4.2, where we see the consequence of Macduff’s flight. The son is one of those precocious Shakespearean children. The messenger provides the narrative, and the murderer acts quickly. Macbeth has become the Herod of mystery plays.

Malcolm’s initial deception of Macduff and then his revelation of his actual character seem rather elaborate, but serve to show the necessity of character in a ruler. And this leads to the showing of the “king’s evil,” which I think was practiced by James. Ross brings Macduff the news of his family’s deaths, and his reaction. “He has no children” seems to refer to Malcolm in the immediate circumstance, but it could reflect onto Macbeth as well. But Macduff’s “But I must first feel it as a man” clearly addresses the theme of manhood which Lady M had introduced and the murders of Banquo had expressed.

Dusty:

I take your point that Shakespeare is interested in exploring the origin of evil: where does it come from? Yes, at the outset Macbeth is ambitious but still innocent, though even before meeting the witches in 1.1. he presumably entertains thoughts of being king, and dark thoughts about how that might happen (Duncan would have to die). It put me in mind of Paradise Lost, where Adam explains Eve’s evil dream in Bk. 4: “evil may come into the mind of god or man/ May come or go, so unapproved, and leave/ No spot or blame behind.” So until Macbeth “approves” evil, decides to proceed, he is innocent. But Macbeth is unlike Eve, who is tested, reassured, then tempted in Bk. 9 by Satan, and after a long discussion about whether or not to proceed, goes ahead (having convinced herself that eating is OK.) Macbeth resists evil thoughts, decides against them, but then he pretty quickly “falls,” after a single rousing speech from his wife. As early in the play as 1.7 he has decided to go ahead, even though he knows full well that he will commit evil. We’ve got four more acts, suggesting that Shakespeare is even more interested in exploring how Macbeth deals with the evil act he has committed. More on that later.

If the play really traces Macbeth’s “fall,” from initial innocence to guilt, then you would think Shakespeare would want to establish his innocence more clearly. But it’s pretty clear from as early as 1.1 that he has evil thoughts. By the same token, you might think the mild and delicate air would be described at the beginning of the play, not in the sixth scene. Shakespeare begins the play with “filthy” and “foul” air, and with a warning that what looks “fair” could in fact be  “foul.”

As for the “origin” of evil, doesn’t it let Macbeth off the hook if we say that the evil thoughts “come from” the witches, unless the witches are an outward and visible sign of the evil thoughts that constantly circulate through the world and mind of man?

In 3.6 I’m still not sure why Lenox speaks ironically rather than directly.

Dusty:

Act 5 is unlike the previous acts in that much is taken up with the battle. And it has nine short scenes, none longer than the first (76 lines). So it picks up the pace, cross-cutting from Macbeth to his enemies. The most powerful parts of this act are devoted to the sharply contrasting reactions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to what they have done. 5.1 is presumably a spectacular scene (or at least opera librettists, who wrote “mad scenes,” perhaps thought so). She is racked with guilt. A bit odd, when you think of it, because so far as I can tell she never literally had blood on her hands. Macbeth was the sole killer of Duncan, and the hired murderers took care of the rest. By contrast, Macbeth is hardened in his evil, and comes to think that life is not worth living — first “My way of life is fallen into the sere . . .” and then in 5.5 the greatest speech in the play, in which he concludes that life “signifies nothing.” He may be a hardened killer, but we are engaged with him in part because of his great poetry. “Last syllable” is striking. I suppose it refers back to “such a word” — i.e. “dead.”

In 5.3 is it not odd that Macbeth trusts the prophecies of the weird sisters over all else, including his experience of war and the reports from his officers? He relies repeatedly on the assurance that he will not have any problem until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. And then in 5.4, as if on cue, the Birnam boughs are cut.

5.5 is in a way the high point, and turning point, of the play, both peripeteia and anagnorisis. It’s all downhill from here. I like Middleton Murry’s explanation of “She should have died hereafter” — i.e., in some imagined world other than this tediously time-bound one. It’s important, I think, that although Macbeth has spilled more blood than any other Shakespearean “tragic hero,” he has not lost the capacity to feel, and to express his feeling. (The rhymed couplets at the end of Macbeth’s speech seem too pat, and flat. (Does not Shakespeare take some risk that Macbeth will take the audience with him?)

The rest of the act is devoted to the battle. In fact, we have been cutting back and forth between Macbeth and his enemies throughout the act: we are with his enemies in 5.2, 5.4, and 5.6. (Those scenes don’t seem to have much power to them, even though they present Macduff and the Scottish patriots preparing to take their country back.) I find it odd that when Young Siward is killed in 5.7, his father gets over it pretty quickly in 5.8. Do we see/hear any grief? We are told that “like a man he died,” which recalls the death of the Thane of Cawdor back in Act 1, and the preoccupation with what it means to be a “man” that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth show. The ending is swift and blunt: Macbeth’s head is brought in — did the Jacobean audience have a taste for that? — and we don’t hear about the killing or surrender of any other supporters. (It’s interesting that at the end Seyton is the only named supporter — contrast the Henry 4 plays.

And Malcolm sums it all up, though I still wonder about Malcolm and his relationship with his father. And where is Donalbain?

Michael:

I don’t think Macbeth is let off by the existence of the witches, who are indeed analogous to Satan’s introduction of temptation into Eve’s dream, but in 1.3 Banquo notes that Macbeth reacts strangely to the witches’ initial prophecy– “start, and seem to fear” — that suggests the witches evoke some sort of recognition in him and are an objectification of something already in his mind. And after they have vanished, he wishes they had stayed. And he speaks favorably both to Banquo and Lady M of the witches and what they’ve told him. This suggests, and would require some sort of response/prompt by the actor playing the role, that he is responding positively to what is thus far only temptation, maybe self-generated temptation, by the witches. I suppose what’s different from Eve’s dream is that she’s still radically innocent, without the taint of original sin, which is different from Macbeth’s world and self. He has that spot or blame that may dispose him favorably to ambition and what ambition may require, but is still capable of turning from it. And when he doesn’t turn away, he actively seeks the witches out in Act 4 and demands response, by which point he is fully involved in the evil. In this sense the origin of evil isn’t a turn from absolute innocence but a gradual approach from some self-generated curiosity and temptation to acceptance and embrace of what it entails.

By comparison Lady Macbeth seems already steeped in evil; her claim that she would rip her nipple from the mouth of her newborn babe and dash its brains out, even though she knows what it is to nurse a baby, seems hard to top for pure evil. It’s almost as if helplessness becomes the stimulus for this.

What you say about contrasting reactions of the two them seems exactly right. Lady M seems in a sense to change places with Macbeth. His “She should have died hereafter . . . Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” seems to denote him as entirely deadened by what he has done. She appears awakened to some inward consciousness that emerges in her sleepwalking, her trying to rub out the imagined blood on her hands, the memory of Duncan’s blood, Macduff’s wife. It’s not remorse certainly, but a suggestion that she at least cannot contain what has been done.

Malcolm is something of a puzzle. The testing of Macduff is strange; was there a more economical way to make the point of Malcolm’s virtue? And the grief for Duncan just seems like a hole that was never filled. I think the two fled because of their fear for their lives, Malcolm just having been proclaimed heir. But some indication of sorrow at Duncan’s death would have seemed appropriate.

In Act 5 I’ve always felt we’re a bit cheated by the equivocation in the two tricks that are played on Macbeth, the man not born of woman and Birnam Wood marching to Dunsinane. Of course they’re good tricks, but something almost comedic.

I wonder if we’re expected to find another odd joke in the name of Macbeth’s servant, Seyton. This must sound like Satan when spoken. Even if it’s said SEEton, it’s going to suggest the prince of darkness, isn’t it?

We do feel a certain relief with Macbeth’s fate at the end of the play. I think we could wish young Siward might have found a bit more grief in his father; even Malcolm seems more willing to express sorrow.

But the oddest bit of topicality is Malcolm’s decree that the Scottish thanes and peers should henceforth be earls. I picture them standing around looking at each other and wondering if they’ll also get a raise.

Yes, Act 5 does seem a bit rushed and maybe something of a letdown. After all the horrors that Macbeth falls into, or rather accomplishes, there isn’t as much to do beyond his death.

Dusty:

Yes, Eve is tempted from without and Macbeth is not. So the play’s answer to your question — where does evil come from?  — is that it can come from within. I suppose one could still ask how Macbeth found it. It would seem that ambition itself isn’t evil, but that it can lead to evil thoughts and then to evil deeds. So we then assume that Lady Macbeth was ambitious for her  husband, and then hatched her evil thoughts?

I think you are right about Seyton/Satan.

For equivocators, the witches are pretty literal-minded when they say “Born of woman.” I would have thought that a child born by Caesarean section is still “born of woman.”

Michael:

I don’t think the Jesuit equivocators would have much to say to those witches. Rather low-grade equivocation.

I do think Macbeth is culpable, even apart from Lady M. After all, he’s the one who’s been thinking ambitiously, maybe murderously, even before the witches. And he seems to have spoken to her even before the witches. Moreover, he married her. Can he be surprised at her encouragement?