Warrior Intelligence

What exactly do we watch in Macbeth? Certainly there is the thriller. Prophecy and hallucination underpin the disturbed psychic texture of its places and epoch. Mysteriously at its outset a man is told he will rise to great office. Fabulously in its conclusion a forest up-and-walks to his castle to bring him his doom.

And from storytelling custom we know that wherever prophecy is to be found comes the implication that Time itself has agency and will act, thrillingly indifferent to human choices. Furthermore, where there is hallucination there may be expected deep psychic unrest. We engage with thrillers because, peculiarly, we relish stories where future events promise to unnerve us. How fitting therefore that Macbeth’s opening line is a chanted question pitched to such a future:

When shall we three meet again …?

This query, and responses from the other two witches, cast a fatalist spell on the five acts to follow. And yet, hard upon what is a determinist construction of Time, comes the seemingly contradictory assertion that the fabric of reality itself resists being determined in both the physical and moral world when the three sisters chant together:

Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Here is a tension at the heart of Shakespeare’s most persistent poetic theme. What is that theme? Story that is inexorable will compose itself from a fabric of reality that is fundamentally unstable. Within the first minute of Macbeth’s suspense, where events will include assassination, usurpation, butchering of innocents, a tyranny that turns nature’s very chain-of-being upon itself, we learn the primordial condition of human living embraces contradiction; events we will see already have a place in time. Yet they will be configured in appearances we cannot trust and which we have been warned are dangerous. Like Oedipus burdened with his Delphic message, we puzzle to reconcile two things. What has been foretold must happen somehow. The destined thing will elude determination even as it presses toward determination. This is the ground upon which Shakespeare makes his exquisite characterisations.

By his first remark in the play, Macbeth attaches himself to this existential fabric, reiterating the witches’ words. “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” he declares to Banquo as the two stride homeward from victory and slaughter. It is a very proper initiation for us into the riddling character of Macbeth, for we meet a bad man who does not repel us. We follow closely the consciousness of a warrior and a soldier, and I make the distinction purposefully.

It is to separate the man heedless of personal safety, “valor’s minion” in Act I, the “chained bear” of Act V, and the deliberate man who leads soldiery for the security of the realm and knows where loyalty should lie. The difference lies in the manner by which warrior and soldier respectively consider risk. In deadly intimacy with his foe, the warrior has the visceral immediacy pressed upon conscious and sub-conscious mind alike—and this is a drama that makes much of wakeful and sleeping mind. Meanwhile soldier and general, with dispassionate mind, must oversee, deploy force, forestall consequence, seek clear options in fluid situations. Certainly warfare is Macbeth’s habituation, but vitally in Shakespeare’s depiction, the playwright brings the above qualities of heedlessness and deliberation to an imagination supercharged to the point of physiological reaction. This we learn from his first scene onstage when Banquo observes:

Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear

Things that do sound so fair?

The physical recoil here, one momentary detail in a play where small detail will often crystallise a moral trait, not only discloses to us how the kingship has already entertained Macbeth’s criminal fancy, but also how consuming such an imagining is for him. He excuses his “dull brain” to Banquo as they leave the heath, reflexively dissembling even as he knows his mental energies have been particularly energised by the witch-encounter. But he cannot dissemble his later reactions when the dagger and ghost illusions scarify him, the one immediately before he turns criminal, the other when a criminal mind-set of covering tracks has overtaken his being.

One aspect of this supercharged imagining is that Macbeth finds himself equipped with resources of imagery and language that serve to affirm him in his predicament. “Consider it not so deeply,” his wife advises him as they tidy up after the regicide. It is vain advice because he cannot but consider it deeply, being a man for whom the expressive reach of language, the unnerving physiological force of his hallucinations, must out:

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep.

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care …

Macbeth’s imagination, unlike that of another Shakespearean soldier, Iago, has a moral dimension, albeit one more concerned with good and ill manners than wrongfulness. Macbeth discerns consequence and does so with incisive logic as he counts the reasons against performing the crime. Furthermore, he construes how others will see consequence. It is the very liveliness of this part of his intelligence, its vulnerability to the scenarios of consequence, that also can be so immediately ignited when the elementary force of Lady Macbeth’s sense of purpose challenges him on his hesitations. “I am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat,” he assures her when, ghastly, she urges him to screw his courage “to the sticking-place”.

That is to say Macbeth, by the very reflexes of his language, is fascinated by poetic power. It possesses him when his expressive resource brings a figment before his mind’s eye, a dagger, a ghost. He knows himself to experience fear, but he does not fear to face fear down, as when he resolves to revisit the three sisters in Act 3. His insecurity compels him to eliminate threat with nihilist thoroughness—Banquo, Fleance, the Macduff family—but this is prompted by a yearning for rest. He envies Duncan his sleep of death. While Iago is never less than fascinated by his next move, Macbeth monitors the conversion of his morale as effective respite eludes him. Here is a character study of the man-of-action overcharged with a power of reflection that affects his physiological well-being, and we measure its impacts, on the heath with Banquo, engrossed as the dagger-illusion materialises into the weapon to hand, or transfixed by Banquo’s phantom appraising him at the banquet.

Yet before murdering his comrade, Macbeth’s wish to speak his “free” heart with Banquo on their unsettling oracles discloses a mind very much wanting to understand the strangeness that embroils them both. Macbeth’s warrior qualities may be superlative, his natural milieu may be the decisions of battle, but his intellect is equally one that is preoccupied with watching self. In the interval before the murder this man-of-action, who we know has harboured thoughts of seizing the kingship, is flummoxed by the prophecy because, if true, he can become king by inaction as readily as he can by acting upon his “vaulting ambition”. Does the future require him to act or wait? The key to that question, as he knows, lies not with fate but with how his own character is wont to make its future:

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill

Why hath it given me earnest of success,

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs

Against the use of nature?

For this reason, Macbeth is never small, as Iago, charismatic in the moment of his deviousness, becomes abruptly paltry when his wickedness is unmasked and he is hustled from the stage with his wound. Nor is Macbeth fate’s object, as Lear and Oedipus become. He makes his predicament and cannot take his eyes from the self that does the making. Thus in the dagger soliloquy, the hallucinatory power of the weapon before his mind’s eye comprises only one half of the mind that we witness here. The up-front of his imagination conjures a present peril to be faced down at the same time as his soldierly common sense knows the thing to be unpresent to his other senses:

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight, or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppresséd brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw …

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses,

Or else worth all the rest.

The vibrancy of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth, to my mind, lies in this most particular mental struggle, present fantasy so strong it impels the action it imagines, locked in close struggle with a commensurate power of lucid reasoning that seeks to distance the hallucination and its subversive temptation, the warrior in nightmare intimacy with his enemy conflicted by the soldier seeking overview of the self embattled in its anguish. So the entire play is a case of the foretold initiating the very dynamism that brings the clairvoyance to pass.

Lady Macbeth suffers similar hallucinatory reactions to their crime as her husband, but her discomposure emerges from sub-conscious mind when she sleepwalks. As urger and doer, she has a steadier nerve than Macbeth, scorning his frenzies, completing the grisly plan when he falters. Her power to command immediate attention lies in the visceral nature of the imagery that colours her speech, the boneless gums plucked from her nipple and the baby’s brains dashed. One sees how impressive such steeliness might be to a warrior habituated to battlefield viscera, who finds here in the gentler sex the temperament of a comrade. Indeed their marriage, apparently childless, is one of the most compatible in Shakespeare, and Macbeth’s almost offhand comment when hearing of her death, “She should have died hereafter”, is a piquant measure of the casualness with which he values his own life at this extreme juncture rather than his dismissing the value of hers. More typically he shows the excitement her presence arouses in him when he exclaims:

Bring forth men-children only;

For thy undaunted metal should compose

Nothing but males.

But Lady Macbeth lacks entirely her husband’s intelligent watch on the thing they are doing together and so, while she may provide the impetus for their crimes, she lives the experience of them less. One almost droll marker of this is her reaction to the news of Duncan’s murder. As hostess, we know she must be told of it and that her reaction will need to be persuasively feigned. We await the moment with some anticipation and it comes, but with a delicate tincture of character. “Woe, alas,” she cries. “What, in our house?” as though it were the location of the crime rather than its fact that outraged moral and natural law. In this, she resembles Iago, looming large when purveying villainy, but small in her end. Iago is pure daemon; she gains human presence for us by secreting the contents of her sub-conscious mind in her sleepwalking.

Macbeth, by contrast, monitoring the process of self by which, as he destroys other lives, he withers the interest he is able to take in his own, leaves no doubt that this introspection belongs to a man who somehow has stature because of his witness. Here is a mind, intelligent with imagery and reasoning to follow closely, luminously, his condition, powerless before the strangeness of his undoing as a thing foretold aligns itself with his volition, then visits him with its consequence. If that mind contains anything obscure to us, it is the original “vaulting ambition” for we learn no good reasons why he wants to be king. For Macbeth, we’ve noted above, has a choice as to whether he will murder Duncan:

If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me,

Without my stir.

But the vital instigation with which he acts—the dagger-illusion—he puts before his mind as being compelled. It is an incisive insight into criminal mental process, the detachment of self from the criminal act—I was led on, it was fate, weird sisters, dagger phantasms or otherwise. No—the man could choose, and knew it.

Of course, with the kingship secured, the power of choice is precisely what Macbeth sees diminish from his new powers. Insecurity compels him to the murders of Banquo and the Macduff household, and the police-state of his reign. His witness of this process brings him to his last soliloquy where he concludes existence is valueless. He speaks of existence per se, even though it is his own fortune that propels his conclusions, but these overlap his circumstances to address all mankind. It could be spoken by a Darwinian atheist or 1950s absurdist, and yet it is dignified and magnificent in illumining the mind of a particular character in a time, in a place.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Do all Shakespearean tragic heroes effectively commit suicide, whether by performing the act upon themselves, as Romeo, Juliet, Cleopatra, Antony and Othello do, by arriving at a predicament of personal peril uncaring as to their survival like Hamlet, Coriolanus and Macbeth, or refugees from atrocious spite, by reaching an exhausted despair as Lear does? That is to say, is personal downfall associated, not with unfortunate circumstance itself, but with the reaction of particular character to the way life becomes valueless as the result of circumstances subverting what has been cherished, that a fate is chosen or allowed from moral reasoning?

So, for instance, Romeo takes poison because a world of inane communal rivalry and the deadliness it releases will allow neither his darling nor the luminescence of mutual sexual attraction to live with fullness of being. So Hamlet, who famously meditates suicide, goes to the duel with Laertes and its treachery, indifferent to his survival in a world loathsome to him because no human relationship (except with Horatio) has shown itself to be undefiled. And so one can scrutinise each Shakespearean hero and heroine for their last attitude and morale.

This searching moral idea was introduced to me in a 1971 tutorial by my wise teacher of the time, Dr Fred Langman, and I found it compelling because it alerted me to a dimension of Shakespearean character I had not previously isolated, namely the morale in any given instance, by which I mean the individual’s sense of value for life itself as he or she considers it through the lens of their particular fortune.

It would be wrong to take Macbeth’s last soliloquy as a suicide note. To the last moment he believes himself safe from all “born of woman”. But it is a declaration from this introspective soldier that all human living is vain. And it is the calmest moment in the play. It is followed by the most furious, as the warrior goes to his frenzies. His image of himself as a chained bear is entirely effective in empowering his desperation; the more furious the battle, the more elementally himself he becomes. But now, we know from this soliloquy, the soldier has nothing to fight for beyond the sensation of the fight itself. He has perpetrated evil, so is dispatched offstage as a moral order returns to Scotland. But until he utters that last “and damned be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough’”, the usurper and tyrant has magnetised our attention and our fears on behalf of others, peculiarly perhaps, he has not especially aroused our loathing.

In its composition, the play finely orchestrates its light-and-dark. Against Macbeth’s dark is Duncan’s reported saintliness and the healing powers of England’s Edward the Confessor. Against Macbeth’s malfeasance is Macduff’s integrity. The theme of “fair is foul and foul is fair” illumines several scenes, as when Malcolm feigns being foul in character to test Macduff’s allegiance, or when the Janus-faced Ross feigns “fair” news from Scotland when he has the massacre of family to report to Macduff.

Macbeth studies the social pathos that breeds under tyranny, the infection of distrust and the necessity to feign attitudes. We note the guardedness of the gentlewoman to the doctor when reporting Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking behaviour, and in another of those almost casually placed verbal brushstrokes, Malcolm notes how Macbeth’s verbalising in the immediate aftermath of the crime is suspicious:

Why do we hold our tongues
That most may claim this argument for ours?

Here is a power of watchfulness; the son is only moments from learning of his father’s murder. The power is a cold virtue, but marks his eligibility for the office he will inherit. Quiet affirmations accrue moral power. “I am not treacherous,” states Macduff simply, having no reason at this juncture to trust Malcolm, who has been in the frame for his father’s murder and now feigns a venal character to Macduff to test that declared integrity. Candour, we have seen, whether at Macbeth’s court or among these emigré lords, is dangerous and contributes to the dramatic tension.

Underlining this tension is the thriller pace of the play’s first two acts. In less than twenty-four hours Macbeth and Banquo put down Cawdor’s rebellion with its Norwegian backing, meet the three witches, Macbeth inherits Cawdor’s title, welcomes Duncan to his castle, with his wife hatches and carries out the regicide, receives Macduff, causes the flight of the two princes, all this and it is scarcely dawn by the end of the second act. Then the banquet occupying much of Act 3 suggests itself as occurring not long after Macbeth has assumed the throne. Nor is the interval between Macduff’s receiving his grievous news in Act IV and his severing Macbeth’s head in Act V a long one. At the same time, we must assume Macbeth’s reign to have sufficient duration for the police-state insecurities I note above to take hold in Scotland, so I assume this to occur in the interval between the assassination of Banquo and the slaughter of Macduff’s household. That is to say, Macbeth wins the kingship, but his reign is allowed no sense of duration by anything said on stage. It is a “walking shadow”.

Macbeth has been called the most Sophoclean work in the Shakespearean canon, and one sees how vividly the fatalist Drang lies upon the action. But my interest in this, and in all these essays, is to probe the playwright’s exquisite powers of characterisation. So I ask, how is this play characteristically Shakespearean in its portrayal of human beings, how is it essentially of the humanist Renaissance esprit in its insistence on particularity in all the diverse manners it illumines?

In the instance of Macbeth, I take the answer to lie in how intricately the drama shows a human individual transferring the agency of fate into acts of volition, and doing this without reducing the pall of fatefulness upon the story. The witches predict truth, not so much by visions seen in the cauldron’s bubbles, but because they have a watch on Macbeth’s character that is slightly in advance of his own watch upon himself. The distance between these two perspectives constitutes the thrilling drama we witness.