“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.
But to effectively examine how Shakespeare presents villainy it is important that an understanding of exactly what the word means be established. It would be overly simplistic, for example, to say that all occurrences that the audience finds disagreeable are excellent examples of the portrayal of villainy. Not least because such crude examination is essentially just recounting the plot and gives little insight into how this feeling of villainy is achieved; nor does it help to illuminate what might be called inconsistencies or failures in such characterisation and, thus, aid in understanding various anomalies of the play as a whole.
Perhaps the best ideas on the methods and problems that a dramatist encounters when attempting villainous characterisation were made by Coleridge, when he said, while discussing the character of Edmund in King Lear:
it becomes both morally and poetically unsafe to present what is admirable,—what our nature compels us to admire —in the mind, and what is most detestable in the heart, as co-existing in the same individual without any apparent connection, or any modification of the one by the other.
That is to say, a villain is rarely wholly villainous. He or she is regularly given motive for their actions or has them compensated for later by way of self-sacrifice. If one needs further evidence for this one need only look to the humiliation of Edmund by is father in the first lines of the play, the stealing away of Shylock’s daughter, the death of Goneril and Regan, one because of love and guilt, the other because she was unsuspecting and set upon or the guilt of Claudius as Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup and so on. It is, as Coleridge feels, likely down to a mortal arrogance that this redeeming feature in villains exists. For it seems beyond human comprehension that a person might have great gifts of intellect, or of any other kind, and not be swayed by the good in them to be better themselves. Such a character would not convince an audience. This, in large part, is the main line of fault that is regularly raised when discussing Iago.
It would seem that characterisation of villains is not as straight forward as it at first appears, certainly the above problem must be considered when examining the play. There are perhaps four major characters that aught to be contemplated Macbeth, his wife, the murderers and the witches. One can count “the witches” and “the murderers” as single units because they display an obvious homogeneity of character, often speaking in unison, and it is not feasible to distinguish between them.
Despite their obvious contribution to the eeriness of the opening scene (perhaps even the play as a whole) it is doubtful whether the witches should be involved in any discussion of villainy and are included largely in order to dismiss them. First, they do not appear to cause any harm (to look at the issue of their influence more try this essay). Whilst they might be said to cause Macbeth to think differently about his situation, he chooses to do so and decides upon his actions just as freely. Their influence is not akin to Iago’s as they have no aims for destruction or evil. At least it is exceedingly difficult to prove that they do by referencing the text. After all, their actions comprise solely of imparting information; and knowledge by itself is surely neutral. Secondly, while their persecution of others, far away, is a prevalent part of building an atmosphere of horror, it is difficult to argue that this casts them as villains. After all these characters do not exist outside of the witches few lines and are by no means central to the plot. If their villainy were to be fundamental to their characterisation it is unusual that their actions be dwelled on so little. Finally, as is the case with most all of the supernatural in Shakespeare, their characterisation is not subject to the same problems as that of human’s. Aside from giving a certain feeling to a scene their role is to highlight and extract nuances of the characters they plague in order to precipitate an organic series of events which, while determined by the actions of the protagonist, may have been influenced by the supernatural. In short: they are often more functional than human characters (as a comparison, the ghost in Hamlet works well). They consequently require a slightly different- or rather require less- characterisation. Thus the witches’ actions would better be viewed as suggestive of the supernatural than hinting at villainous impulses.
Understanding Lady Macbeth’s villainy is far less straight forward, not least because, initially, she seems like a woman whose ambition and evil intentions cannot be kept within the belt of restraint.
In her primary discourse with Macbeth Lady Macbeth focuses solely on the actualities of any plans she makes and considers her plans as if the future and the present are almost the same; as if the action required to turn one into another is slight. This is tied to the fact that she has very little conception of the effect her actions will have on both herself and her surroundings. Act one has “Thy letters have transported me beyond/This ignorant present, and I feel now/The future in the instant.”. Her initial seeming control is a façade, to Macbeth and to herself but the above line belies her later troubles.
There is a childishness in her actions, if not a kind of innocence then certainly some breed of naivety. The repetition of earlier lines which implied a very literal reading of the moment at hand gives weight to this point. The audience views act five’s
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.
very differently from her earlier “unsex me” and act two’s
Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.
despite the fact that the content has much in common. Part of this feeling may be attributable to the addition of qualifying statements, e.g. “yet who would have thought”, “Yet here is a spot”, “what’s done cannot be undone”, changes than can themselves be attributed to a failing of her will to hold off her conscience.
It would be fool hardy to make the argument that Lady Macbeth was not villainous. The influence she exerts on Macbeth is great and that which she forces on her self is of no lesser magnitude. Her speeches in act one are some of the most horrifying in all of Shakespeare. They are real. She does desire to do great evil and is thus wicked.
Yet even in that, the reality of humanity is omnipresent. Her chief concern from the outset is that her better nature could get the better of her. So it is her desire and ambition that decide her course, not her inhumanity. She could not be said to be merciless, only that she wished to be. For those without mercy (e.g. Iago) do not suffer remorse after the deed.
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'
Her humanity failed to over power her ambition, but could not be suppressed forever. Whilst she may be a villain, at her heart she is childish. It is her lack of control over her desire, naivety and subsequent torment of conscience that serve to redeem her in the eyes of the audience. They also result in her failing to be represented as being as tragic as her husband. These trials balance the villainy of previous acts, not just because they prove the existence of a better nature existing alongside the Lady’s many faculties but also because she seems to thoroughly repent under their influence. It is a testament to Shakespeare’s great skill as a dramatist that there might be said to be some pathos surrounding a character who commits acts of such grave abuse.
Macbeth’s evil deeds are also balanced by the power they are to give his conscience. But his is a far more imaginative and tragic downfall. The ability of his imagination is hinted at from the out but becomes more obvious as the play progresses. It seems, for example, that the idea of advancing himself through fowl play is not altogether foreign to him, even during his first encounter with the witches. The initial contrast between him and Banquo is strong and is indicative of problems in Macbeth. 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.
Perhaps Macbeth's soliloquy at the outset of act one, scene seven is the most telling as to his hamartia. 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.
It is in this state of consideration, of a weighing up of the evils of his intentions that Lady Macbeth arrives and begins chastising him. She jibes at him
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?
Yes, yes and yes. 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. After all, he could simply have exited refusing to talk any more about the idea but instead he left her with "We will speak further". 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; and how quickly he is bent back into familiarity with that temptation! Within thirty lines of his wife’s entry he questions “If we should fail”, the murder is almost done and twenty lines later he has entirely yielded to his temptation.
I am settled, and bend 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
In short, while Macbeth and wife are both resolved to kill Duncan, it is not a resolution that was arrived at by identicle roots, nor is it held with equal confidence. Macbeth, perhaps because of a greater self knowledge, perhaps because of a greater exposure to death, struggles. He seems far more wary. It is this self knowledge of Macbeth that distinguishes him from his wife. His is the conscious choice, the obvious downfall; the actions of his wife are the result of a childish want and taken in ignorance of their full outcome. It is this that sets Macbeth apart from his wife as braver but, more importantly, tragic.
The differences between the competencies of the two initially are echoed by their contrasting demises. Lady Macbeth falls, for the most part, as a result of not being able to cope with what she has done, outcomes she had not foreseen. Conversely, tragically, Macbeth is ruined by his hamartia. He has already decided that he will be ruled by ambition and is very much braver in the face of the humanity of his conscience than his wife. He is slave to his ambition. Rather than shying away from his guilt he continues, continues killing. His attempt to kill Banquo and Fleance is an attempt at solidifying his status, to prevent Banquo from acquiring the royal line, not, like his wife, repentance. Though that he requires others to do the deed tells something of his troubled conscience and something of the state of Lady Macbeth that he tries to keep the knowledge of it from her. It is the same bravery that gained him the title of “brave Macbeth” that allowed him to fly in the face of his conscience, his haunting h allucinations.
The murderers’ villainy is very much more obviously mechanically constructed. Nonetheless, in the few lines Macbeth has with them, it is revealed that they are motivated by the belief that some hardship which befell them was the fault of Banquo. While their characterisation may even be said to be hap-hazard this is largely irrelevant. It is unlikely that Shakespeare wished to raise any point in particular through them, or that any there be any great enjoyment in the fullness of their characters. They act chiefly as a mechanism. Moreover, one might speculate that the third murderer was Macbeth but that is all. There is no solid evidence in the text, or even a hinting, that this should be the case. Supposing, he was the third among them, it is unlikely that this would make any great difference to his character or the way in which the plot is carried forward.
To conclude, even in the most basic of villains, the murderers, evidence can be found to support Coleridge’s feeling that in order to successfully portray a villain, certain redeeming characteristics must be incorporated into that characterisation. This is not required in the witches, because they are not acting as villains and also because the involvement of the supernatural requires a certain faith from the audience and an acceptance of different rules; so that, even if the characterisation of the witches were to portray them as unbelievable humans, they are not human and are indeed, unbelievable. The villainy that is evident from the introduction of Lady Macbeth is later, if not immediately, countered by the audience’s realisation that she was as a child, unaware of the consequences of fulfilling her desires, both in terms of the harm to herself and the true seriousness of her actions. There is even a certain pathos generated during her final, sleepwalking, scene. This is largely down to the repetition of literal thought and the continuation of an inability to express, if not to appreciate, that the actualities of a situation extend beyond the material. How Macbeth’s merits might be said to save him is a little less obvious. Certainly the audience is aware that he suffers greatly as a result of his actions, the illusion of a dagger, the disturbance to his sleep, the guilt, the ghost of Banquo and so on. It could be claimed that this alone sets him apart from any Iago types as having his merit try to reform his evil. Perhaps a stronger case could be made that it was his bravery, an essential part of his success that ultimately aided his ambition in his struggle against all of the above, and the triumphing of ambition. It did, at least, give him a consistency that could be said to be honest. Doubtless though, the redeeming features are a mixture of the two.