Macbeth and the Problem of Evil (Or, Why Does the Pot Call the Cauldron Black?)

In Macbeth, Shakespeare grapples with the problem of evil in a way that is more subtle and careful  -- and also more enigmatic -- than the way other writers approach this theme.  Unlike, say, Paradise Lost, Macbeth makes no attempt to answer our questions about the nature and cause of evil.  That Paradise Lost succeeds as a poem is not a testament to the strength of Milton's theodicy -- in fact, it succeeds despite Milton's theodicy, which is primarily a curiosity to a modern reader, and which has been misinterpreted (perhaps deliberately) by our predecessors, most notably the Romantic poets.  Blake, of course, claimed Milton to be a closet Satanist, "of the devil's party."  This is the kind of pitfall Shakespeare wisely avoided by making his plays character-driven and not idea-driven.  Shakespeare is one of our greatest thinkers, yet he eschewed philosophy of this sort.  He seemed not to like answers, only questions.  Macbeth, then, offers a perfect support for Keats's famous observation about "negative capability" in Shakespeare: "... when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

If there is an idea or set of ideas behind Shakespeare's explication of evil in Macbeth, it is more like an anticipation of Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil.  Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are hardly banal in any way.  But the evil that they do emerges from their character, from their human weaknesses.  In Shakespeare, evil is not a character in a morality play, nor a philosopher's caricature of one.  It does not derive from a transcendentally signified source and assert its authority.  The view of evil as a preternatural force, a view that predominated past eras (and is still present in modern times) and which is present in superficial readings of Macbeth, is not valid ultimately in this play, the Weird Sisters notwithstanding.

Why cannot supernatural forces be the cause of evil here?  After all, as one of the witches says, Macbeth is "wicked" -- meaning bewitched.  But if Macbeth is bewitched, it is clearly because he has allowed evil forces to enter into his heart, just as Lady Macbeth does with her "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" speech.  The witches merely hold up to Macbeth a mirror of his own secret thoughts.  As A. D. Nuttall observes in Shakespeare the Thinker, Macbeth's start at the witches' prophecy is "the most economical feat of dramaturgy ever ....  Macbeth's start means, 'How do they know that I have already thought about this happening?'" (284).  The supernatural power of the Weird Sisters is in knowing Macbeth, not in controlling him.  In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber notes that

The witches never directly suggest a course of action, nor do they tell Macbeth to murder Duncan.  It is his own “horrible imaginings” and his wife’s prompting that move him in the direction of action. (707)

The witches never say how it is that Macbeth will become king, only that it will happen.  If they have some metaphysical control of him, Shakespeare never says so.  Banquo does nothing to secure the witches' prophecy to him, yet he does eventually "get kings" -- the witches play no role in this but expressing foreknowledge of the fact.  In fact, the witches' only practiced power, despite their talk of curses, seems to be that of prophecy, of knowledge and foresight.  Macbeth is certainly played with by supernatural forces, but his actions are fated only in the classical sense: they are a natural extension of the qualities of character that he possesses and therefore an expression of his own being.  As Heraclitus wrote, "A man's character is his fate."

All this external wrangling aside, let us take it as a given that Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's actions are evil.  What causes these two to commit themselves to evil actions?  Iago's evil was described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as "motiveless malignity."  The reasons Iago himself gives for his actions are not ultimately very convincing; they are all out of proportion to the evil he inflicts.  Richard III was, perhaps, simply evil by nature, a crookback owned by the devil with only the tiniest gleaming of conscience.  Iago and Richard are fascinating psychological studies, but neither one provokes much sympathy.  But Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do, or at least they should.   In his characteristic fashion (that is, offering a bold claim that has the ring of truth to it, but providing little in the way of evidence), Harold Bloom writes, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

Macbeth suffers intensely from knowing that he does evil, and that he must go on doing ever worse.  Shakespeare rather dreadfully sees to it that we are Macbeth; our identity with him is involuntary but inescapable.  … Macbeth terrifies us partly because that aspect of our own imagination is so frightening …. (517)

Macbeth is an embodiment of our own guilty feelings, amplified.  Never mind that we're not killers nor usurpers.  Because we recognize Macbeth's feelings as legitimately human -- as how we would feel if we had done such deeds -- we cannot fully condemn him.  To do evil is one thing.  To simply be evil, however, is an oversimplification.  Shakespeare, the colossus of the early modern era, lived with one foot in a world that believed in demons and witches and another foot in a world that would create science as we know it, realism, and psychology.  He gives us a Macbeth -- and eventually a Lady Macbeth -- who suffer, who feel guilt, who feel, and the sensitive reader or playgoer can never be fully against such characters.  The Macbeths are tormented, and they are psychologically real.  "Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife": has anyone on earth ever suffered so much guilt for his own willful wrongdoings?  When the Porter claims to be porter of hell-gate, perhaps this is what his speech unwittingly suggests -- that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth will straightaway begin the torment that they will suffer for their sins. 

The question then remains: what motive does Macbeth have to pursue evil? 

What does not seem to explain Macbeth's actions is a lust for power.  Unlike Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Macbeth spends very little time expressing his desire for "The sweet fruition of an earthly crown" -- and in fact he is keenly aware that he is the possessor of a "fruitless crown."  Macbeth is a perfect antithesis -- parallel but opposite -- to Tamburlaine.  Both are usurpers, yet one, like Ozymandias, lives to bear an imperious frown with which to cow the world and to sneer his cold command, while the other seems not to know what it is at all that he wants from the bargain.  The only thing he seems to wish for is to make his wife happy.

Love itself, then, is one explanation, perhaps the most compelling, for Macbeth's actions.  Bloom notes (again without providing any evidence) that the Macbeths are "profoundly in love with each other" (518).  As evidence, I would offer up Act Three, Scene Two, with its pervasive use of terms of endearment, and with the Macbeths trying their best to gently reassure one another, to soothe each other.  We know that "dearest chuck" is the kind of thing that's humiliating to say in public but fair game in the bedroom.  That love could lead to evil is certainly not unheard of in Shakespeare.  Consider Othello's claim to be "one that loved not wisely but too well."  Could the same be said of the Macbeths?  Macbeth loves his wife well enough to kill for her.  Before killing Duncan, Macbeth resolves to be quit of the matter until Lady Macbeth insults his manliness and prods him into action.  Is this compelled subservience or love?  (Is there a difference, the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche somewhere asks.)  The news of his wife's death causes Macbeth to launch into the most powerful statement of nihilism in the text, a profound meditation on futility and the nature of time.  In this context, Macbeth's only motive seems to be his love for his wife -- once she is gone, the whole enterprise is utterly bootless. 

Macbeth's overpowering prolepsis may also to some extent serve as cause to his evil deeds.  Macbeth bears perhaps the most powerful imagination in all of Shakespeare, so powerful that it is out of his control.  Macbeth suffers an inability to distinguish between present and future; he has been disjointed from time.  Even in his great soliloquy, upon hearing of the present news of his wife's death, the only terms he has for expressing his reaction are grounded in seemingly irrelevant future modalities: "should" and "would."  His wife is dead, and confronted with a situation that epitomizes the pastness of the past, all Macbeth can think about is the future and time in the abstract.  Like an Abraham Lincoln speech that is almost completely devoid of first-person singular pronouns, Macbeth's reaction here is curiously both personal and impersonal.  Macbeth's "horrible imaginings" mean that he walks about in a kind of fever dream, unable to sleep.  His mind, once again, is full of scorpions.  The hallucinatory power of the play comes even before the murder.  When he sees the bloody dagger, Macbeth surmises, "Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses / Or else worth all the rest."  He seems implicitly to side with the latter judgment.  In writing about another play (Antony and Cleopatra), A. D. Nuttall notes that "Your sturdy empiricist is usually clear that mental images are unreal." Macbeth is clearly not a sturdy empiricist.  Nuttall continues: "... Hume, the arch empiricist, was to discover that the only way he could distinguish percepts from images was by the greater 'vivacity' of the percepts."  In Macbeth's case, the percepts pale to the vivid haunts of his imagination.  The sense connected to the mind's eye is indeed worth all of the others.  Lady Macbeth's description of her husband ("My lord is often thus") when he envisions Banquo's ghost is perhaps a convenient excuse, or perhaps an indication of what we would consider today to be an ongoing psychotic or even schizophrenic condition.  Of course, Shakespeare would never have recognized the condition as such, but as Bloom states, "humankind will never stop catching up to him" -- it's not unimaginable that Shakespeare would be sensitive to such mental states before the rest of us were able to define them. 

Along similar lines, one might wonder if Macbeth is suffering from a clinical condition that has only in recent decades been acknowledged as a serious source of distress for many combat veterans.  Does Macbeth suffer from a pre-modern version of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder?  In the first image we get of Macbeth (through the Captain's spectacularly vivid speech), we learn that he has "unseamed" his foe "from the nave to th' chops."  The shedding of blood is what Macbeth does best.  We are well aware today of the potentially dissociative effects that combat experience can have on the individual.  To imagine that this is a modern disorder and not one that could afflict someone in  Shakespeare's time (or Macbeth's, or Homer's, for that matter) is to sell humanity short. 

As impossible as it seems, Lady Macbeth's motives are altogether more complicated, more difficult to sound. 

In assaying her motives, though, we should first note that Lady Macbeth is a woman in a man's world.  For comparison, Lady Kaede, the Lady Macbeth-inspired character in Akira Kursosawa's Ran, presents an excellent illustration of a woman at odds in a male-dominated feudal culture.  In Kurosawa's garish technicolor phantasmagoria, Lady Kaede essentially masterminds the downfall of entire clans.  Her motive is revenge.  Shakespeare doesn't give us any such clear motive for Lady Macbeth, but the point can be justly applied.  In order to advance herself in this world, Lady Macbeth takes on the sensibility of a man -- or she tries to, but the "compunctious visitings of nature" come to her eventually despite her best efforts.  To gain power in such a world as the one she lives in, she might use only nefarious means.  She must be unsexed in mind and deed to wield power.  This fact alone fails to generate much sympathy for Lady Macbeth, though, just as Lady Kaede in Ran fails to excite any sympathy -- just fascination.  Ultimately, there must be more to Lady Macbeth's character.

Lady Macbeth's background is poorly defined in the play, but it gives us much potential for speculation.  Holinshed's Lady Macbeth is a widow.  What happened to her husband?  What happened to her children?  Lady Macbeth makes it clear that she has been a mother -- "I have given suck" -- but the only children in the play are Macduff's murdered babes -- a gruesome reminder of Macbeth's own childlessness.  (As Bloom wryly but chillingly notes, "Unable to beget children, Macbeth slaughters them.")  Given the bloody climate of the play's Scotland, we can guess upon the nature of the demise of Lady Macbeth's previous family.  The kind of grief Lady Macbeth might have felt -- from a husband lost, from children lost, from both, perhaps -- might have deranged her.  Shakespeare never mentions a former husband, though, and he deviates from Holinshed in numerous ways.  But the child, whether Macbeth's or another man's, is referred to, and in the most hideous of fashions, when Lady Macbeth claims to her husband,

I have given suck, and know

             How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.
             I would, while it was smiling in my face,
             Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
            And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
            Have done to this.

This most shocking inversion of the stereotypical maternal ethic is Lady Macbeth's boldest speech in the entire play, maybe the boldest speech in all of Shakespeare.  Its intensity is such, I would say, that it could hardly be rhetorical.  If we attempt to understand Lady Macbeth as a fully human figure and not simply a caricature of evil, the question then is what deep psychic wound, what distress or trauma, could provoke such a speech?  Perhaps the answer is right here in the text.  Lady Macbeth has nursed a child, and that child is gone now.  Is the anti-maternal ethic a psychological protection from the anguish that the maternal ethic once provoked in her?  There might be more than gall here; there might be tears as well.  This speech might be Shakespeare's way of offering a brief but compelling insight into Lady Macbeth's character.

Thanks to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the DSM, we now know that women can and often do suffer serious psychological disorders accompanying motherhood.  Once again, Shakespeare was not a modern clinical psychologist, but he was observant of human nature.  We shouldn't assume that just because there wasn't a label for these conditions the symptoms didn't exist.  As with Macbeth's potential case of schizophrenia or PTSD, Shakespeare might have understood something about this aspect of human experience long before the rest of us caught on.

One of the qualities that makes Shakespeare so great is his understanding that the mind is a complicated terrain and that motive is often mysterious and opaque even to oneself.  He understood the fragmented nature of consciousness.  He understood the nature of long suppressed desires.  Lady Macbeth's character is not so well developed as is her husband's, and so we must necessarily speculate here, but what we do know is that Lady Macbeth, too, eventually suffers for her evil deeds, and this is what humanizes her.  Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman and the doctor both know what she has done, and they pity her even as they are horrified by her.  Perhaps we, too, might view her with the same mixture of pity and fear, the hallmark qualities that tragedy evokes according to Aristotle's famous definition.

In thinking about the Macbeths, I am reminded of the epigraph to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It's a quatrain from Francis Villon's "The Ballad of the Hanged Men":

          Brothers, men who live after us,
          Let not your hearts be hardened against us,
          Because, if you have pity for us poor men,
          God will have more mercy toward you.

(Translation by Craig E. Bertelot, from the UC Davis website; Capote notoriously includes only the original French in his epigraph.)

Villon, a criminal himself, offers us the voices of those about to be hanged for their misdeeds.  Evil, depicted rightly, always has a human face, and the perpetrators of evil deeds may indeed be worthy of our sympathy.  The problem of evil, though, in the broader sense, will have to remain unsolved.