Poor Players

The production of Macbeth that I saw performed recently at the University of Kansas was noteworthy for a couple of things: the over-the-top Disney witch quality of the Lady Macbeth performance and the curious absence of anything resembling even a modestly gory spectacle. And what is Macbeth -- perhaps the first horror story of the modern era -- without a little spectacle? The Lady Macbeth bit might have worked with a little more blood, more brains and guts and "gory locks."

There was one moment, though, that made the audience gasp -- the moment in Act 5 when Macbeth responds to the news of Lady Macbeth's death: "She should have died hereafter." So sharp and callous was the tone of delivery that everyone present -- mostly high school students, some of them my own -- could feel the sting of it.

Though there was a certain power to it, this delivery is not consistent with the way I read Macbeth. The Folger edition of the play glosses the line so: "she would inevitably have died sometime; or, perhaps, she ought to have died later." It's impossible to know exactly what Shakespeare intended; the context could lead to either interpretation. I have always preferred the latter reading, though, in part because it corresponds with my understanding of Macbeth's character (and of his relationship with Lady Macbeth) and partly because of the dramatic heft that this reading adds to the play's finale. Seen the latter way, this moment carries with it a crushing irony that finally and completely devastates Macbeth's spirit shortly before his own demise.

Immediately preceding the announcement of this tragic bit of news, Macbeth muses to himself: "I have almost forgot the taste of fears. ... Direness ... Cannot once start me." The lines that follow, then, can serve one of two purposes: to reinforce the notion that Macbeth is utterly dead at heart, that nothing can provoke him -- and thus he responds with coldness to his wife's death; or to set the stage for an ironic reversal: Macbeth has enough humanity buried within him to feel this last and ultimate blow. Hemmed in by enemy forces, harried by the knowledge that he has no heir, deprived of any rest or comfort, Macbeth can only keenly be aware of the fact that all that he has done -- what he knows will result in the eternal forfeiture of his soul -- he has done for his childless wife. He has bloodied his hands at her bidding. Either he sees her here for the masterful manipulator that she is and thus repudiates her or the love that he bears for her -- a doomed, even tormented love -- achieves its apex and terminus here: the last scrap of meaning that the world could have for Macbeth is now gone forever.

We have already by this point seen Malcolm and Donalbain's grief (truncated by the necessity of circumstance) at their father's murder, and we have seen Macduff's near-paralyzing grief at the announcement of the murder of his wife and children. In the Shakespearean mode of extensive parallelism in language, event, and theme, it is fitting then that the architect of these griefs would himself be the recipient of such bad news of his own. If Macbeth does convey a sense of near-overwhelming grief here, the emotive dynamic of the play's final act is thus enhanced through this irony: the reaver's own bereavement. Thus this moment becomes the core structural-thematic antithesis of the play.

There can be no definitive reading of Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech and the two lines that lead to it, but we can say a few things with certainty. First, this speech -- Macbeth's most famous -- is certainly provoked by Lady Macbeth's death. That fact is momentous in itself; whether he is immune even to the horror of his wife's death or whether he is nearly blown down by it, whether she should have died later or would have died anyway, Macbeth is at this moment confronted with a visitation of mortality that affects him more than any other in the play (barring his own pending death). Thus, second, the announcement directly provokes the most profoundly nihilistic speech in Shakespeare -- indeed, it is hard to find its equal for nihilistic vision in the history of our language. Third, from this moment on Macbeth truly has no further capacity for emotion: it's all been spent on this speech. Shortly after this moment, he compares himself to the bear at the stake: the only thing driving him at this point is the base animal instinct to survive. He has no personal motive to prick him on by this point: his kingdom is certainly lost, his queen dead, his throne never to be graced by heir of his own.

Our alternatives, then, are to read a flat trajectory into Act 5 or to convey a sense of the complex dynamics of character and event. One thing we can say about Shakespeare is that he rarely gives us a simple, unambiguous character, good or bad. Macbeth is a tragic figure, and to feel the tragedy of his undoing we need to see what makes him human. His love for Lady Macbeth is precisely that mark of the human that we need to see in him.