“Macbeth” depicts the fall of a general struggling to increase his reach of power. The play commences on a heath, when Macbeth is called after as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and then “King hereafter”. The most former is already a truth and the second swiftly becomes one. Macbeth’s downfall hides in the latter promise- that of kingship. A bloody tragedy consisting of the murder of King Duncan, Macduff, his children and wife, Banquo and the horror of almost everyone else follows.
Before embarking on an answer it is important to understand that part of the genius of Shakespeare’s tragedy lies in the fact that the plot has a certain “organic” feeling. That is to say, events appear to progress naturally- actions that are taken appear to be in keeping with the character that performs them. Where this rule is broken and a kind of “accident of fate” or improbability occurs (for example Desdemona dropping her handkerchief or King Lear deciding to divide his kingdom- for more information see this essay on fate in Macbeth) there is a weakness in the tragic structure; a concept that is beyond the scope of this essay but it would suffice to say that such occurrences are the exception and not the rule. So much so that in looking for the influence of “the World” on Macbeth one has to look to how the outside world affected him not which of his actions were dictated by the outside world for there are no such improbabilities here. Furthermore, and to be clear, Macbeth is the tragic hero of the play. Therefore the question dictates that one considers everything else as a property of “the World” including the other characters. It seems, consequently, that it would be logical to consider the question in two parts, how Macbeth himself contributes to the tragic outcome – what conscious choices he makes and how he resists temptation - and how the World acting on Macbeth contributes to the tragic downfall -largely through temptation and the experiences it uses to shape Macbeth’s character .
It would likely make more sense to deal firstly with how the world contributes to the tragedy before examining Macbeth’s own effect. And there are two main areas of interest here; first there does appear to be an influence exerted on Macbeth’s ambition, a drawing to the surface, both by Lady Macbeth and the Witches and second, both his past and his present experiences of the World seem to distort his capacity for fear or imagination.
The effect of the witches is undeniable but what they never do is control Macbeth, they could not be said to be fates. They predict only situations not actions. The first two titles with which they greet Macbeth are true and require no action on his part so argumentation that the third must be different seems unfounded. Moreover, it is difficult to claim that the witches are any more than women who have befriended evil spirits who have in turn granted them particular powers. This was the popularly believed convention of the time and there is no sign that Shakespeare has strayed from it. Banquo’s remark “you should be women” is testament to as much. Perhaps the best response to the argument that the women were symbolic of fates was given by A.C. Bradley when he said “fancy the fates having masters!”. One might argue that for the witches to have foreknowledge of the future is for it to be fixed and, therefore, fated. But such a reading seems laughably abstract and to have exceedingly little basis in the text, after all Macbeth was not written for students of metaphysics.
What the witches could be said to do is to act as a dangerous circumstance with which Macbeth has to contend. They bare a similarity to Othello’s Iago or the sycophantic flattery of King Lear’s daughters. It is not the world itself that is against Macbeth it is the way in which his particular character reacts to his world that is the cause of the crisis. He may just as easily have shrugged off the encounter, as Banquo does. The contrast between the two in this scene accentuates Macbeth’s ambition. He is startled upon hearing the witches predictions and seemingly ashamed to think of believing it (“Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear/Things that do sound so fair?”). On learning of the truth in their prediction that he will be Thane of Cawdor, his thoughts turn instantly to the throne and how he might acquire that too.
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? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
These thoughts arrive with him instantaneously. Arguably, Macbeth’s earlier discomfort on hearing the witches’ predictions was a result of a guilty and ambitious heart, one which had already dreamt up, enjoyed and discarded the idea of royal murder. It is perhaps also a fear of a knowing self, a Macbeth aware of his weakness to ambition and of the likelihood that he might use the witches’ predictions as a mandate to achieve the outcome they predicted. There is also the “burned in desire to question them further”, in Macbeth’s letter to his wife, to be considered. Interestingly this letter is written in prose, a form which usually indicates either temporary mental incapacity or an unintelligent character. The argument could be made that Macbeth’s ambition was so disturbed by the witches that he temporarily lost his composure and articulation.
Coleridge has: Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in warfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual,—the representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,—that the proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impres-sions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves
And yet no immediate change is seen in Banquo. Indeed, some argue whether the knowledge changed him at all. He answers the witches honestly and curiously, as if they were to him simply an oddity, a fortune teller at a fair. His retort to them comes across as part jibe part fascination.
My noble partner
You greet with present grace and great prediction
Of noble having and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal: to me you speak not.
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.
It is as he is thus “rapt withal” that he rides home to his wife, who is similarly incapacitated. This is where the need for the witches as more than just a device for atmosphere is most evident. Had the witches been absent and Macbeth arrived home to be greeted by Lady Macbeth with a plan to kill the king it is unlikely he would have accepted. All that was needed was for him to insist that such action was wrong and he would not yield. Instead, as a result of the witches, as a direct consequence of having the possibility pandered to of mulling it over- in short of the World’s influence on his mood- he damns himself with “We will speak further”. Is it not laughable to suggest they might meet later to reject the idea because they were presently uncertain!?
Lady Macbeth was certainly of that opinion and when Macbeth later expresses doubts she is furious. He had just thought through the idea in a soliloquy at the beginning of act one, scene seven in which he was starting to recover from the influence of the witches when his wife lambasts him. What Macbeth is fighting is the temptation that his ambition taunts him with. Though he never tied himself to carrying out the murder as much as Lady Macbeth wishes to persuade him he did hint that he would consent. When they first spoke on it they were closer to the time of the event, closer to the temptation, to the promise of the witches that it would come to be as he wished it. There is much criticism that is centred around the idea of the pure evil of Lady Macbeth in persuading Macbeth here. Truly though what occurs is that an ambition weakened Macbeth is bent back into familiarity with his earlier temptation. All that Lady Macbeth could be credited with doing is compounding a kind of pride and nostalgia with said familiarity.
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
Taken together this goes some way to explaining why within thirty lines of his wife’s entry Macbeth is reduced to questioning “If we should fail” (the murder is as good as done) and twenty lines later he has entirely yielded to his temptation.
I am settled, and bent up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
Away, and mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know
To be sure, the witches and Lady Macbeth have a significant amount of influence over Macbeth but only because he permits them to. Rather, only because his make up and conditioning are such that he almost cannot help but be influenced by these agents. Had the same agents done something other than goad his ambition it seems unlikely they would have wielded such power. That leaves the second major device by which the World Macbeth inhabits has an influence over him yet to be discussed: that of his experience in it. This is a rather clumsy way of saying that, aside from his encounters with forces that aggravate his ambition, Macbeth’s experience of the world may have caused a reaction in terms of what he was willing to tolerate. This seems to be a dynamic property, whereby the greater hardship and bloodiness he has experienced the greater the amount he feels comfortable with. He becomes obviously brutalised.
This fact is revealed to the audience rather late on in the play, V v 9
I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.
Although, certainly such a feeling was hinted at through his increasingly bloody progression towards his own demise. Indeed, when he exclaims in act three iv
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
The Macbeth of previous acts would never have permitted himself to commit such acts without thinking about them first, even if he was ultimately tempted by them it was not without a certain reluctance. Macbeth’s reaction to Banquo’s death and Fleance’s escape is a turning point, from this point on Macbeth concerns himself only with killing and dominance even when it seems pointless.
This gradual wearing down of what can only be described as a basic humanity in Macbeth has consequences for his imagination. It was always an imagination with a narrow scope. For example, where Hamlet would question the nature of existence after an encounter with the supernatural Macbeth thinks mainly of self promotion. It seems that his imagination is most stimulated by what is foreign to it- most guilt. This is so with his first murders, where he sees a dagger leading the way. After killing Duncan he looses all composure, forgetting what he was about and bringing the daggers down with him. When Macbeth has Banquo killed his imagination still insists on bringing his guilt to the fore but he certainly exercises more control over it. By the time that the murder of Macduff’s family takes place it is difficult to mark any reaction of the imaginary sort in Macbeth at all. Although this is appears to be as a result of his frequent exposure to great evil, the World which he inhabits cannot be said to be wholly responsible. It was largely out of the strength of will which was gifted to him by ambition that he continued to put himself in situation where he would be exposed to that level of horror. Indeed, one of the elements of his character that propels him into tragic dimensions is this strength of will. There is a pathos generated by such a determination in the face of mental torment He is forced to face his own guilt, the thing he most fears and would rather face anything else.
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble: or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword;
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!
However the self might have been influenced and weakened by the outside world, it cannot be said to be entirely without blame itself. It remains a matter of fact that the World Macbeth inhabited may have tempted him to kill but it did not force him, that is to say the choice was a conscious one. A choice made in full knowledge of the consequences that it could have not just on the material but on Macbeth’s own well being. That this mindful choice took place is made evident by his soliloquy at the beginning of I vii, just before Lady Macbeth tempts him back to evil. It is in this soliloquy where the battle between a basic humanity within himself and his own ambition is outlined. He opens with words implying a concession to his ambition
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here
But then quickly progresses onto the evil of such a deed, the basity.
He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
The speech finally climaxes in perhaps the most important yielding of all his speeches, at least the most crucial to understanding his downfall. He concedes that, if he should kill Duncan, he cannot hope to justify it by any means other than to say he was ambitious. This kind of killing might seem particularly alien to both himself and the audience when contrasted with the recent battle, in which there was so much mention of honour and a sense of justice in action.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.
These last few lines are instrumental in implying his choice and his knowledge that everything could go badly wrong. Moreover, it sets Macbeth aside from his wife by showing his decision to be considered- in short to be a downfall from a greater self. Lady Macbeth’s movement is far less dynamic it isn’t just that she does not display such procrastination but rather that she does not seem to realise that such action will have consequences that reach beyond the literal. This is what ultimately leads to her downfall but also what demotes her below the tragic levels of her husband. For example even in the sleep walking scene her monologue is dominated by expressions of actualities in the material world, a spot on her hand a knocking at the door and so on- but never her conscience or the right or wrong of the situation.
So to conclude, where other plays like Hamlet and King Lear have an obvious bias towards generating tragedy in the self or in the World in which the character find themselves (respectively), Macbeth appears more balanced. There obviously exists a biased against him in the World which he inhabits, mainly in the form of aggravating his ambition. This is most obvious in the contrast between Macbeth and Banquo when first encountering the witches and in Macbeth’s failing struggle to resist his wife’s goading. But there is just as equally an influence of the self. Shakespeare goes out of his way to make it obvious that Macbeth had free will, that he moved by his own mandate and (through the introduction of the soliloquy in scene seven of the first act) that Macbeth’s own ambition and not only the encouragement of any outside force was something to be reckoned with. Moreover, it took a considerable strength of will for him to ignore the calls of his guilt and the power of his imagination and continue on a course of blood. This was a course that he himself hinted at when he said
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
and his will power was certainly his own.