Among movie presentations of Macbeth, Roman Polanski's is cinematically best. Still, the deepest genius lies in Shakespeare's text. It teaches this lesson: What we do makes us who we are. Deeds not only express, but also create character. Macbeth's choice to murder Duncan tilts his psyche toward internal consequences unanticipated and desperate. Driven to annihilate what should be sacred— life, children, the natural bonds of human compassion and friendship, and conscience itself—he destroys himself psychologically.
Fearless on the battlefield, Macbeth nevertheless is terrified to see himself yielding to the temptation of murder. So vivid and powerful is his anticipation of killing Duncan that it “shakes (his) single state of man,” dividing him against his moral self, loosening his self-integration, and undoing his integrity, his “single state.” It also disrupts his single sense of reality, so that “nothing is but what is not.” He now also must live doubly, keeping what he inwardly feels and intends private, while in public masking “with false face what false heart doth know.” Macbeth progressively divides himself away from his friends, his countrymen, and even his wife. While Banquo promises to Macbeth an “indissoluble tie,” Macbeth is driven to “cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale!”—the bond not only of Banquo's tie to life, but also the “bond” of friendship by which these comrades were united in a shared identity and purpose.
With progressively greater success, Macbeth attempts to rationalize and evade his own horror at what he does. Ultimately, he undergoes a metamorphosis, conscience itself withered and murdered by “withered murder.” Knowing that his plan to kill Duncan is wrong, he negotiates with himself. When he first hears that the witches have spoken true, he hopes that he may become king by chance alone. With passivity, he may be able to keep his murderous urges at bay. When in the next scene he is frustrated to hear Malcolm named successor to the throne, however, Macbeth again acknowledges active strivings: “Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires.” His eye, his reasoning, self-observing conscience, will wink and collude in a pretense that he will not see and know what his own hand will do. He must dissociate himself from the deed.
Just as her husband asks that stars' light be hidden, Lady Macbeth also calls for thick night to drape itself in “the dunnest smoke of hell”—the witches' fog and filthy air—to keep heaven from holding back the deed. When she asks “that my keen knife see not the wound it makes,” she, like her husband, wishes to separate herself from the deed her heart desires. Conjuring the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,” just as the witches conjure Hecate, Lady Macbeth acts as if she were a witch herself. Asking to be “unsexed,” she takes on ambiguous gender, just as Banquo noted that the witches' beards made their gender uncertain. As Janet Adelman writes in Suffocating Mothers, both they and she appear to represent the unleashed power and malevolence of women, threatening to depose and dominate the masculine order.
For Lady Macbeth, her husband has “too much of the milk of human kindness,” invoking the most tender relation of nurturance and compassion, mother nursing babe. Lady Macbeth, however, defines her husband's softer, empathic side as pathetic womanliness, as if only pitiless hardness makes a man. She implies his receptive femininity when she says she will “pour my spirits in thine ear,” as if to inseminate him with manly valor she has but he lacks. Bidding the murdering ministers to “come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall,” Lady Macbeth rejects her inborn maternal nature, and becomes the masculine woman, filled “from the crown to the toe, top full of direst cruelty.”
Unable to grasp or empathize with her husband's revulsion at murder, Lady Macbeth castigates him harshly for his hesitation, belittling his love for her, his sexuality and manhood, goading and coercing him to extreme masculinity that is undaunted and ruthless. Most shocking of all is her annihilating attack on any remaining maternal nurturance: Sadistic and brutal, she would dash out the brains of her suckling infant. Having just conjured the image of “a naked newborn babe” to represent pity itself, Macbeth seems overwhelmed and intimidated by this terrifying image. Murdering Duncan has become the test of manhood, and failure to be a man might leave him as vulnerable to her undaunted steely mettle as a baby or female.
It is Lady Macbeth who unmakes her husband, dashing out his brains, putting his conscience to sleep, just as she drugs Duncan's guards. In the face of her beguiling, threatening,
Samuel T. Goldberg, M.D., a training and supervising analyst at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, has lectured on tragedies of Shakespeare at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. He practices in Columbia, Maryland.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
and humiliating speeches, Macbeth, as described by Harold Blum in 1986, becomes like a dependent son to a demanding omniscient mother, clinging to the passive position without responsibility. In the same manner by which he turns to the witches, projecting power, knowledge, and initiative, he is entranced and overpowered by his wife, whom he can neither control nor impregnate. Swept along, he permits himself to be used, living out her omnipotent fantasies. In their irrational exuberance, the Macbeths form a folie-a-deux, caught up together in a delusion of power and invulnerability. Instead of Macbeth, soft Duncan now becomes the vulnerable infant to be destroyed.
In Shakespeare's Window into the Soul, Martin Lings points out that when Macbeth tells the servant, “Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, she strike upon the bell,” he unknowingly prepares to drink his own poisoned chalice, the bell tolling not only for Duncan, but for him too, for psychologically he is taking his own life. In killing Duncan, not only does Macbeth “cancel and tear to pieces” his bond to an external sovereign, but also that to his inner sovereign, his conscience, which warned him against his lust for greatness and which might have provided internal approval and honor.
Macbeth returns from Duncan's chamber “afraid to think of what [he has] done.” Now unable to wink, he must look at his bloody hands, yet can hardly realize that they are his own, asking, “What hands are here?” Quite disrupted is his single state of man. Most starkly, he says, “To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.” He must split his awareness of himself. To be the Macbeth that murders, he must sacrifice being the Macbeth who conceives himself acting by ideals and commitments, for the two are irreconcilable.
Having staked everything on becoming king, Macbeth experiences no satisfaction, but only futility and dread of retaliation. Childless, he frets bitterly that, while the witches prophesied that Banquo's children would be kings, they have placed “upon my head a fruitless crown… no son of mine succeeding. If't be so… I [de]filed my mind, … to make the seeds of Banquo kings!”
Now arranging Banquo's slaughter, he is grimly compelled to compound evil with evil. Failing to recognize that his sleeplessness and dread derive not from any external threats issuing from Banquo and Macduff, but from the relentless internal pressure of his conscience, which he has now disavowed and externalized, he refuses to atone for his transgression, instead rationalizing that his malice has been inadequate. The very insouciance with which he jokes after Banquo's death, telling the killer, “Thou art the best of the cutthroats,” shows how effectively he's expurgated pity, remorse, and concern.
Yet, not only will “terrible dreams . shake [him] nightly.” A nightmarish hallucination spills over and invades Macbeth's waking life. Banquo's ghost confronts Macbeth most forcefully with the reality of what he has done, that events, and his own mind, are spinning out of his control. Not only is he separated from his comrades. Macbeth is dissociated from and has lost himself. Having waded midway across a river of blood, he is at the point of no return. Thereafter, he is all ruthlessness, except for defiance and outrage, emotionally deadened. Again embracing darkness, he returns to the “black and midnight hags.”
Far from nurturing milk, Macbeth has nothing to drink but the hell-broth of witches' cauldron, into which are thrown perversions of procreation: “finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-delivered by a drab (prostitute).” He demands that they answer him, “though the treasure of nature's (seeds and young sprouts) tumble all together,” as if to confirm his war not only on children, but on all regeneration and growth, on the propagation of bloodlines, first of all Macduff's.
Impotent in his barren scepter, Macbeth will have murders for children. Eschewing cooling words, he opts for unreflected action, passionate deed without deliberation. What remains of life is rage and cold indifference. Having supped full of horrors, Macbeth no longer can be startled by his own slaughterous thoughts. Yet, he remains able to reflect on the changes in himself, observing that he has a mind diseased, unable to respond even to the death of his wife. He recognizes himself as the “poor player strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage, then to be heard no more.”
Still enmeshed in a regressive world of female enchantment, Macbeth believes he bears a “charmed life which must not yield to one of woman born.” It is Macduff, from his mother's womb untimely ripped, who finally emancipates Macbeth from his submission to the witches' prophesies, telling him, “Despair thy charm.” (Barron 1960) Macbeth finally disbelieves the “juggling fiends,” and is slain.
In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom argues that, in a nihilistic universe of amoral drives, Macbeth's crimes against nature cannot be righted, because “Nature is crime.” In this view, nature's relation to the moral concerns of human beings consists in profound indifference. By contrast, one might argue that Macbeth's persistent violation of the natural order for a thoroughly social animal makes his inner and outer destruction inevitable. Having rended and defiled the structure of his psyche, he is condemned to live as the new and horrid Macbeth, his self his punishment. In this view, morality emerges from and is woven into the very structure of nature. Which view was Shakespeare's? Characteristically, the Bard stays aloof.