Tortured by his thoughts, Macbeth has no safe refuge even within his own mind. After murdering King Duncan in order to take the throne, Macbeth comes to his wife with his hands still bloody and the daggers from the murder scene:
MACBETH
Macbeth 2.2.36-44
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
LADY MACBETH What do you mean?
MACBETH
Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house.
“Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore
Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
Perhaps more than any other, this remains a play where voices and presences have been given to both conscious thoughts and subconscious impulses. Guilt becomes more than just another character, more than just a voice that cries at Macbeth from within the darkness of his deed, or a prison spotlight that throws a glare over him forever. It also becomes a feverous ripple that manifests in the play’s action, rousing Lady Macbeth from her sleep near the end of the play, so that, sleepwalking, she makes a last fruitless attempt to wash the psychological stain of complicit blood from her hands. The guilty memory of blood haunts her, having sunken much more deeply into her mind more than any mere recollection of its colour might do against her inner eye. In her somnambulism, when her subconscious mind is awake, she can even smell the blood upon her skin.
Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the
5.1.50-2
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh!
In terms of Macbeth, Ewan Fernie describes the “transitional phase of self-abandonment to sin the Devil [that] becomes truly an end in itself.”* Of course, an ongoing critical argument debates whether self-abandonment and being drawn into, or even coerced into something are exactly the same thing, but Fernie’s evaluation makes a valid point. “Macbeth’s original criminal act does have the quality of the absolute he wishes for it; for a time at least, it indeed is the be all and the end all.”* Like powerful nations steered by simple profit motive, or fires in the Amazon rainforest, Macbeth’s decision to murder his king, regardless of whatever falling domino of the psyche may have pushed him over that tipping point, becomes an all consuming event.
This decision, this step into destruction, not only destroys Macbeth and his Lady, but it also (at least for a time) destroys the entire world. Fierce in his observations of his country’s suffering under Macbeth’s tyranny, Ross tells us that Scotland has become a place where “violent sorrow seems/ a modern ecstasy” (4.3.169-70). Fernie writes that “Macbeth is most alive in his sheer negation of life”*, but even as he struts and rages, his colour also drains from him. He tells us that his “way of life/ Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf” (5.3.22-3). Nearing the end, he admits, “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun,/ And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now undone” (5.5.48-9). Macbeth’s fateful decision to murder Duncan precipitates the decline and dissipation that occupies the rest of the play.
As Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth:
Light thickens,
(3.2.51-4)
And the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
Light thickening twilight aside, the atmosphere itself also physically thickens around the Macbeths, constricting and confining them. Already banished from sleep, Macbeth has also become isolated from the good things of the day, as these are still able to droop and drowse. He has (unwittingly or not) sworn his allegiance to the confederacy of night’s predatory agents, and as the light thickens around him, it becomes a confederacy which he cannot escape.
Once on that road, the way becomes relentless as a driving rock beat, which reminds us of how much music seems to deal with the subject of damnation:
Reflecting certain structures in human consciousness, the play Macbeth seems to work in threes, with the prophetic trios echoing those in scripture. The three witches that appear to Macbeth and Banquo on the heath suggest a pre-Christian prophetic potency eerily reminiscent of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The three murderers who assail Banquo and Fleance, again suggest this supernatural triad as it becomes imbued with human agency, the prophetic three realised and embodied on the physical mortal plane.
Notice the devil drawing the three witches’ attention away from the light and towards the night. Conversely, in Rembrandt’s drypoint drawing of The Three Crosses, the chiaroscuro is dominated by the central light, suggesting holy illumination, from above.
Structurally, the play partitions Macbeth and his Scotland, defining his initial heroic, supportive, pre-murder phase, which is followed by his multitudinous killing spree which eventually winds down into his final exhaustion at an existence to which his own being has become antithetical. By the end, Lady Macbeth cannot stop seeing and smelling the blood of complicity on her own hands, but Macbeth himself has moved far past seeing or even being sensible to such things. Blood has become such a common feature of his interior landscape that it is beneath his notice. “I have supped full with horrors;/ Direness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts/ Cannot once start me” (5.5.13-5).
The structure also bears a curious resemblance to a kind of unholy rite. Margaret Jones-Davies notes that Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline fits perfectly with the alchemical narrative. The whole play is alive with alchemical connotations that are ingenious ways of bringing coded peaceful answers to the current polemical issues.”** Yet, a similar argument may be made for Macbeth, that the play’s structure, beginning with an intrusion of the obscure, the “foul”, and the “filthy” into its atmosphere, progresses through a series of murderous episodes that have been initiated by a blood sacrifice made to baser human impulses which supplant the nobler goals of spiritual transcendence encoded in alchemical ritual.
Taking the lust for power as its impetus, Macbeth inverts the whole of the alchemical wedding. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both partake of murdered King Duncan’s blood. “My hands are of your colour” (2.2.83) Lady Macbeth tells her husband after retrieving the daggers from him to replace them in the murder room. Rather than seeking a spiritual detachment from their grosser human natures, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth pursue and embrace their baser selves. Lady Macbeth advises Macbeth to “Look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under it” (1.6.76-7). The blossom of spiritual ascension is eschewed for the ways of the Satanic serpent lurking beneath. The metaphor explicitly incites the carnal and opposes the alchemical symbolism of abandoning the physical for the spiritual. The path that leads to the loftier cultivation of the flowers in the garden of the human spirit is forsaken for a way that leads deeper and deeper into blood.
Fairies and ancient goddesses dance the world into existence by dancing in a ring. *** Their dance unites the creative impulse of dancing itself with all of creation as it spins into being. In Macbeth, the witches dance too, but their dance around a cauldron that contains dead pieces of flesh amputated from once living creatures, is a dance of uncreation, in a sense. It is a dance of truncated and dissected corpses.
When Macbeth encounters the witches at their cauldron, and asks what they are doing, they answer in unison, “A deed without a name” (4.1.50). This nod to unbaptism, to things existing outside of the holy order of being, features an unnamed deed that does not/cannot participate in creation. When the scriptural God says, “I am that I am”, He asserts that He is the quintessence of being or “isness”. Conversely, the unnamed is the essence of what is not, the uncreated, the unformed, the incomplete, the unuttered and perhaps unutterable. If what is named or what is in being is holy, then that which is not named, or is not in being must be the inverse of holy. In this scene, the witches, and by extension Macbeth (since he has come to seek their counsel) become mutually participatory in unbeing. Through his interaction with them, Macbeth becomes more intimate with the undoing of creation, the uncreation that is the photographic negative, the dark antibeing to universal assertion of existence. It is an undoing that weaves into Macbeth’s fragmenting and disintegrating being, even as he continues his reign of terror, extending undoing to those around him by upsetting and undoing their lives as well.
Ultimately, this is where Macbeth’s subscription to negative alchemy takes him. His weariness of the sun marks an exhaustion with the life giving affirmation and sustenance of the world. Although his character remains alive almost until the final scene, Macbeth becomes a kind of ghost even as we watch, fading into the literally growing woodwork of his own play. Birnam wood not only marches to Macbeth’s Castle at Dunsinane, but it consumes him, as life again takes root where death has been.
Malcolm’s final line returns us to the inclusivity, the positivity of being. “So thanks to all at once and to each one,/ Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone” (5.9.40-1). No longer is the monarch killing others off or shutting them out, but he is specifically inviting them into the process of their own sovereignty. Like the outcome of the search in Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Malcolm’s new monarchy reasserts an affirmation of life over death. For all the rough weather in reaching it, the end of the play becomes an affirmation of the ways in which we seem to long for life to work.
Of course, it isn’t perfect. Life is fluctuation, variance. Sometimes, people, through no fault of their own, remain unable to do what they want to do or unable to be where they feel they might belong. When Macbeth sends a murder squad to surprise the Thane of Fife’s castle, Macduff loses, as Ross sorrowfully relates, “Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.” After such grief, Macduff’s new life mission becomes avenging his family and putting Malcolm on his rightful throne. In some ways, even though it seems to right the ship of state again, for Macduff it also seems most likely that life may become hollow once Malcolm is on the throne. Nothing really brings back the dead. Even Banquo’s ghost remains an echo of guilt as much as he might be an actual phantom at the feast. Too close to Macbeth when the corruption began perhaps.
In terms of Macbeth’s turn to the tyrannical, the point is well taken that what we do follows us, and again, in music we find some of the most vivid examples of possible damnation. There’s a legend that famous blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a local crossroads to become a famous bluesman. Apparently, it is a legend that the singer cultivated as much as possible, because it provided him a kind of mystique which he might otherwise not have had. Whether or not there might be any kernel of truth to the story, Johnson’s final recorded musical track (Hellhound on my Trail, 1937) remains no less haunting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHAIgpih86E
Part of the lyrics are:
I can tell the wind is risin’, the leaves tremblin’ on the tree
Tremblin’ on the tree
I can tell the wind is risin’, leaves tremblin’ on the tree
Strikingly reminiscent of Macbeth’s life, “fallen into the sere/ The yellow leaf”.
After his final recordings, Johnson disappeared from the public record. He apparently had been found dead by the side of a road in Mississippi in 1938. According to an account by another famous bluesman, Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnson may have consumed whiskey that had been poisoned after he had flirted with a married woman. It remains difficult to know whether or not hell had finally caught up with him but death certainly did when Johnson was only 27 years old.
The fact remains that most of us, we strive to affirm as much as possible, embracing the ways of growth and life over those of “dusty death”. We help ourselves by helping others, as not one of us gets out alive. Life seems short enough without going down to the crossroads at midnight on the dark of the moon, or deciding not to wait for chance, even though it certainly may crown us without our stir. When the moment of decision arrives, brief candle though we may be, let us hope we will all make the most of that, for whatever time we may have upon the stage.
*Fernie, Ewan. The Demonic: Literature and Experience. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 51, 61, and 67. Ewan Fernie’s excellent book looks at the idea of the demonic from a number of different perspectives, as it relates to human experience in a number of different literary and philosophical works.
**Jones-Davies, Margaret. “Cymbeline and the sleep of faith” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 208. A fine collection that purports to look at Roman Catholicism in early modern England, but with some far ranging implications in terms of religious thought in general as well.
***For further reading on this idea, see Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York: Norton, 2013.
Lovely piece, great deal of work… But relevant!