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SOME PROBLEMS FOR CRITICISM
IN “MACBETH�

When did Macbeth First Entertain the Idea of Killing Duncan?

A careful reader of Shakespeare’s Macbeth will understand that the hero had entertained the idea of killing Duncan and seizing the throne even before his meeting with the witches. But when did he actually entertain the idea for the first time?

Evidently it must have been during a point of time not covered by the play; that is, it must have taken place during a time prior to the commencement of action of the play. When the witches greet Macbeth as “Macbeth that shall be king hereafter�, he trembles and Banquo draws pointed attention to that with his, “Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?� This is the first hint we have of his guilty conscience. Then, soon after the receipt of the message that he had been made Thane of Cawdor, in his “aside� Macbeth makes two confessions. He says:

This supernatural soliciting
cannot be ill, cannot be good; if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor?
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
            Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair?� and
            “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
            Shakes so my single state of man.�

That is, there was an evil suggestion in his heart to which he had already fallen a victim and even when that (the idea of murdering the king) was only in the imaginative state his entire body shook and his heart throbbed vigorously against his ribs.

Later when he tells his wife not to taunt him too much with the charge of cowardice and that he had courage enough to do whatever would become a man, she cuts him short with:

“What beast was it then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?�

This again reveals that it was he who first made the suggestion, to kill the king, to her. Therefore, Macbeth had not only entertained the idea of killing the king and seizing the throne, but had also communicated this to his wife. The lady also pointedly says that when he first made that suggestion, neither time nor place had been favourable and when they had both made themselves favourable with the unexpected arrival of the king at their castle, he seemed to out. So, when did he first think of such a plan? When did he break that plan to her?

There is no decisive hint in the play with regard to these. But there is no harm in thinking on these lines. The idea of killing Duncan and taking possession of the kingdom came to Macbeth in the midst of his individual combat with the king of Norway. Let us examine Ross’s description of that battle.

“Norway himself
With terrible numbers,
Assisted by that most disloyal traitor
The Thane of Cawdor, began a dismal conflict;
Till that Bellone’s brid.egroom, lapp’d in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons,
Point against point, rebellious arm against arm,
Curbing his lavish spirit.�

It was the feeling that he was more than a match to a king and the aged Duncan was utterly dependent on him, that made Macbeth entertain that idea.

Even though this description of the battle appears in the play after the first appearance of the witches, this battle takes place before their appearance and they at once decide to greet him with tempting prophecies.

Then, when did he communicate this idea to his wife? We find that between his meeting with the witches and that with the king, Macbeth had managed to write a letter to his wife. It is with this letter in hand that she makes her first appearance in the play. Can’t we suppose that he had written to her another letter even earlier, immediately after his victory? It is only natural for a husband like Macbeth to inform his wife of the outcome of the battle through a personal messenger. In that letter he could have broached the idea. In fact, when the two meet for the first time in the play, we find her telling him “Thy letters have transported me beyond this ignorant present�, thereby indicating that he had written to her more than one letter. It is even possible that he had hinted it in the first part of the letter. Lady Macbeth is seen reading, as she reads aloud only its last part.

But it is better to suppose that (1) The first idea of killing Duncan came to Macbeth during the triumphant moments of his individual combat with the king of Norway and the witches knew of it at once and decided to tempt him and (2) Immediately after the battle and before the meeting with the witches, Macbeth wrote his first letter to his wife. This alone would account for the way he starts and shivers when the witches make the prophecy regarding his becoming a king. A mere vague idea that had just passed through his mind during the battle cannot justify this starting and shivering. And, of course, when the second prophecy of the witches came to be fulfilled in minutes, Macbeth could not but write his second letter to his wife, in the context of what he had written in his earlier letter.

“He has no Children�

It has been universally conceded that these words of Macduff are capable of three interpretations. Of these, the most widely accepted one is to take the word “he� in the passage as referring to the young Malcom who had so lightly dismissed Macduff’s deep sorrow over the death of his wife and children and asked him to convert the same into a spirit of revenge. In that case Macduff’s words would mean that if Malcom had been a father he would not have dismissed his sorrow so lightly. The other two interpretations are based on the assumption that Macbeth had no children. But are we justified in taking that for granted?

In the scene that opens with Macbeth’s “If it’s done when it’s done� soliloquy, we find Lady Macbeth telling:

“I have given suck, and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me�, which shows that she was a mother. But critics usually take this as a reference to the fact that the historical Lady Macbeth had a child by a former husband. But Shakespeare has made some very daring departures from his sources in this play and we need not suppose that he would have stuck to them in this unimportant detail. Further. Shakes­peare would not have given us a passage in a tense scene the key for the understanding of which lies in some other book. Thirdly, it was most unlikely that the lady would have introduced a reference here to a child by a former husband at a time when she was asking Macbeth, in the name of his love to her, to kill the king. Even otherwise, we are to interpret the play only within the two covers of the text and the question regarding Shakespeare’s adherence to or departure from Holinshed and others is purely of academic interest.

Then, do we have more direct references in the play to the fact that Macbeth had children? In Banquo’s soliloquy which begins, “Thou hast it now�, we find him telling:

“Thou hast it now, king, Cawdor, Glamis, all
As the weird women promised: and I fear
Thou play’dst most foully for it; yet it was said
It should not stand in thy posterity...�

If Macbeth had no children, there would have been no occasion for these words. Further, in the soliloquy that begins with “To be thus is nothing,� Macbeth refers to the prophecy of the witches regarding Banquo and says:

“They hailed him father to a line of kings.
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
            No son of mine succeeding.�

These words clearly show Macbeth had children. If he had no children, he would not have bothered about the pro­phecy regarding Banquo’s children as, anyway, the crown would have had to pass to some one else, on his death.

The introduction of Macbeth’s child or children on the stage would have created an interest alien to the main spirit of the play. The same would have been the case if the child referred to in “I have given suck�, had been Lady Macbeth’s. In “Antony and Cleopatra�, reference has been made to Cleopatra’s children, including the one she had by Julius Caesar. But they do not appear on the stage. In Bernard Shaw’s “Candida�, again, there is a reference to children who do not appear on the stage.

Apart from this, I fear the full significance of the passage
“I have given suck, and know
How tender it is 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�

has not been realised at all. Some have taken it to mean that the lady was more murderous than they had expected her to be. But the implied comparison is this. The first sugges­tion that the king might be murdered had come from Macbeth and it had acted very much like a sperm and in the mind of Lady Macbeth it had been “conceived� into a plan which she had later “delivered� to her husband. That is, this idea had become the pet child of her imagination and had captured her fancy as much as the child she had given suck to as a mother. She would sooner allow her real child’s brain to be dashed out than have this pet child abandoned at that stage. As such the passage only shows the extent to which the idea of killing the king and seizing the throne had captured the lady’s imagination.

Who was the Third Murderer in the play?

In the first scene of the third act of the play, we see Macbeth engaging two men for killing Banquo Fleance. But in the third scene of the same act wherein Banquo is murdered we find three men.

Who was the third man?

Some people have suggested that it was Macbeth himself, while a few others have said that it could be Ross. Both these ideas are so far-fetched and fantastic that it is not proposed to examine them at all here.

Dr. Johnson thought that the lines
“Within this hour, at most,
I will advise you where to plant yourselves,
Acquaint you with the perfect spy of the time.
The moment on it,�

contain the clue to the presence of the third murderer and he was none other than the perfect spy mentioned by Macbeth earlier. But there are difficulties in accepting this theory. The first two murderers are already on the spot when the third joins them and he does not at all seem to have gone there to tell them where to plant themselves. Further, those two people clearly appear surprised to see him and do not behave as though they had been expecting such a person. After all, Macbeth only meant that he would inform both those people, as a result of his close watch on Banquo’s movements, where exactly they had to stand and when. Therefore, when, in the third scene, the second fellow tells the first:

“He needs not our mistrust; since he delivers
Our offices and what we have to do,
To the direction just,�

he only means that, by his exact knowledge of what they were to do he appeared to have been employed only by Macbeth and therefore he had not to be mistrusted. Hence Dr. Johnson’s “Perfect spy theory� cannot be accepted. Can we think of any other way out of this problem?

The soliloquy at the end of which Macbeth declares his determination to get rid of Banquo, begins in this way:

“To be thus is nothing;
But to be safely thus: our fears in Banquo
Stick deep ....�

Almost at the same time, Lady Macbeth asks a servant whether Banquo was gone from court and on being told that he was, but he would be returning that night, she asks him to bring Macbeth. These things show that the “Banquo-problem� had been exercising her mind also and she wanted to have an exchange of views with her husband. The servant being gone, she tells herself:

“Nought’s had, all’s spent
Where our desire is got without content�

Which is the same as Macbeth’s “To be thus is nothing, to be safely thus:� Then she goes on to say:

“Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.�

Macbeth echoes this idea later when he says:

“Better be with the dead,
whom we, togain our peace, have sent to peace,
Then on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.�

These parallel thought-processes show that the two people had been independently thinking of Banquo as an enemy whose death was absolutely essential to complete their happiness. Later, when Macbeth tells her:

“O! full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife,
Thou know’st that Banquo and his Fleance lives�.

her reply is,

“But in them nature’s copy is not eterne�, that is, they were after all mortal. This is not just a statement that they would die one day or other and then these people could be happy. It emphatically tells that if these two people tried, Banquo and Fleance could be got rid of. Macbeth understands it as such and only then does he partially reveal his plans to her. When we see them again in the banquet scene, it is clear that he has fully confided in her. We must suppose that in the interim she suggested the sending of a third man to strengthen the first contingent of two as Banquo and Fleance made two people and Banquo was the greatest soldier of the realm after Macbeth; or unknown to Macbeth she sent the third man. Anyway, it is clear that Lady Macbeth had a hand in the where­from and why of the third murderer.