And so it was with Lady Macbeth. Murder, to those who were not injured by it, was no crime in her opinion, and excited neither terror nor remorse. She was to the last unconscious of being criminal or sinful. Her life was the playing of a red-handed game by one who thought herself innocent. For this reason she could walk placidly through any evil she contemplated. She knew that her persuasive power over men lay in her womanliness, and that in this there was nothing compromising. Unlike her husband, her face betrayed no moral conflict. The Puritan spirit had never penetrated her own nature. Whatever her outward religion might be, she was at heart a materialist, not from conviction, but from shallowness, due to the absence of all the higher powers of reflection and imagination. Banquo is dead, and therefore she knows that it is impossible for him to come out of his grave to torment his murderer. It is only necessary to wash the blood from her hands, and that will clear away the consequences. Even the “spirits,” to which her husband has alluded; those which she mockingly invokes to her feminine aid, have no reality to her, because they have no material whereabouts. So that her husband’s talk about conscience and retribution is unintelligible to her. She knows that what he would do “wrongly” he would like to do “holily,” because she has heard about the Ten Commandments; but these things have no meaning for her, they do not come within her experience. With her limited outlook, the beginning and end of everything necessary for her husband’s success in life is that he should be practical, inventive, and never appear embarrassed.
The most marked feature, then, in Lady Macbeth’s character is her femininity, and Shakespeare dwells upon this trait throughout her career. In the first place, no one at Inverness Castle suspects that she is accessory to the terrible crime. Macduff is distressed at the mere thought of telling her what has happened. The woman who would have been trampled under foot in the courtyard on that eventful night, if the truth about her had been known, becomes the centre of immediate anxiety when she faints, or feigns to faint, to rescue her husband from a perilous position. Duncan could not find words to express his delight at her charm as a hostess. The guests at the royal coronation banquet grieve that she should be exposed to a trying ordeal through her husband’s extraordinary behaviour. The doctor who overhears her dying confessions is a “mated” and “amazed” and incredulous at the thought of her self-implications. One voice speaks of her with harshness, and it is that of the son of the murdered King, and then only at the close of the play. If, again, we turn to her own reflections, it is always her woman’s weakness which she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder is something foreign to her temperament; the details are ugly and revolting; the sight of blood may unnerve her. She can do the crime herself if she can accomplish it without seeing the wound the dagger will make; but she evidently imagines that her husband, who has killed men in battle, can do it better, and this conviction becomes a moral certainty when she is confronted with the pathetic figure of that trusting, white face, with its whiter hair, so like her own father’s. When the fatal moment arrives she cannot meet her husband in her normal mood, but has recourse to the wine-cup, not because she shrinks from the notion of murder, but from dislike for the details of the operation. She has, besides, all the little partialities of a woman who delights in the beauty of the innocent flower and in perfumes of Arabia. Then the thought of being a Queen and wearing a real crown is an intense delight to her. Macbeth knew of her weakness for finery when he sought her approval of the deed; it was his bribe for her help. And women of Lady Macbeth’s temperament do not care to be disappointed of their pleasures. To break promise in these matters, she tells her husband, is as cruel as it would be for her to kill her own child, that being a crime of which she is incapable, for she is a devoted mother.
Nor must the marked contrast between her attitude before and after the crime be overlooked. At its inception, murder is a mere means to an end, which creates no misgivings in her mind. She sees “the future in the instant,” a future which gives her “the golden round,” and bestows on her husband “sovereign sway and masterdom.” But no sooner is the crime committed than her optimism fails her, for her husband seems no nearer to “masterdom” than he was before. After the coronation there comes her tragic reflection that the murder was a mistake. Unfortunately for her, it was worse than a mistake; it was a blunder for which her husband deposes her authority. No longer does he listen to her counsels, and although she has not lost any of her charm or her womanliness, her spell over him has gone for ever. Never again can she say, “From this time such I account thy love,” but merely ejaculates, “Did you send to him, sir?” No such cruel awakening was in store for her husband. He knew from the first that his crime must bring retribution and arouse the anger of the gods; but she, for her part, foresaw no harm and no consequences. It is the shock of her failure which paralyzes her power for further action. She is not repentant, because she is unconscious of having sinned, and to the last she is at a loss to understand why murdering an old man in his bed has divorced her husband’s affection from her, and turned him into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Her brain is not big enough to take in what all these things mean, and under strain of anxiety and disappointment her mind gives way. This, then, is the Lady Macbeth that Mrs. Siddons identifies as “a character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless as Macbeth.”
There is no portrait in Shakespeare’s gallery of women more generally misunderstood than this one, the reason, perhaps, being that the poet has not been credited with the desire or experience to draw a type of woman so obviously disingenuous. But no one can read Shakespeare aright who thinks that the men and women who live in our age do not resemble those who lived in his time. Not until we read the Lady Macduff scene carefully can we grasp the kind of woman Shakespeare had in his mind. Then it will be evident that the real criminal in the play is Macbeth, whose conscience warns him that “unnatural deeds beget unnatural troubles,” and who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be influenced, out of connubial love, into an action of which he knows his wife to be incapable of foreseeing the consequences. When disaster follows, we can set up that “womanly defence” for her and say, “she meant no harm.” There is no such appeal possible for her husband, who is condemned from the first out of his own mouth.
Shakespeare, it must be remembered, wrote the play of “Macbeth” probably about 1605, when the Globe actors were still competing with the children at Blackfriars, who, with their fine music, gorgeous costumes, and “candlelight,” attracted the well-to-do people of the town. In this tragedy, therefore, Shakespeare revives interest in the Faustus legend, once so popular at a rival house. The notion that man could set himself up in opposition to the Deity was due to the teaching of the Reformation. If man could defy the supremacy of the Pope, might he not challenge also Omniscience Itself? Having once tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, Faustus will not rest until he can know all, can do all, and dare all:
“Till swoln with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow.”
And Hecate prophesies of Macbeth that—
“He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes ’bove wisdom, grace, and fear;
And you all know security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”
To playgoers at the Globe, then, the interest in the play of “Macbeth” lay in the man’s daring attempt to defeat the supernatural. The scheme of drama requires that Macbeth, like Faustus, shall be the pivot of the play. Of necessity, then, it is an error of judgment for a stage-manager to allow the part of Lady Macbeth to be overacted. Apart from the witches, there are only two women in the play, neither of whom are of more than common mould. They are alike in this, that both are by nature domestic, and appreciate family ties; while in other respects they are finely contrasted, and represent the old and the new type of character which must have so interested dramatists in Shakespeare’s time—that of the Renaissance or Italian type, upholding the doctrine of expediency; and that of the Reformation, demanding obedience to conscience.
Shakespeare’s Jew and Marlowe’s Christians.[7]