Macbeth: Masculinity as Murder

G. Wilson Knight, in one of those rapturous outbursts to which he was given when writing about the plays of Shakespeare, once described Shakespeare's Macbeth as one who is “poetically, a new man after the first murder, dramatically a more violent one after the second, and philosophically a noble, though unrepentant, creature of a sublime and courageous self-knowledge and superb poetry at the close when at last an honest and therefore sin-free relation to the world is established.”1 In such a view of Macbeth we can easily recognize yet another variation on the rhetoric of masculinity as aggression, a centuries-old, powerful cultural assumption which in a variety of quarters has come under increasingly critical scrutiny in recent years. And if the logical and ultimate conclusion of that aggression is the irrevocable act of murder, there are those in literature and in life who have not shrunk from such a step. Robert Heilman, in his splendid study of manliness in Shakespeare's tragedies, observed that

when bloody violence is demanded in the name of the manly, few men can resist the challenge…. Normally, when “Be a man” rings in the air, man as destroyer must act; other imperatives waver, and the challenger or situation may not be inspected. “Be a man” works thus even though the exhortation comes from an outright scoundrel or someone morally ambiguous. More often than not the appeal to manliness is used to suborn or justify murder; in this sense Shakespeare places a common ideal in very ironic perspective.2

And Jan Kott, writing about Macbeth, quotes the words of the terrorist Chen in André Malraux's novel Man's Fate, “A man who has never killed is a virgin,” which Kott explicates