˛ The scene and act open with Banquo’s status report on the witches’ prophecy of 1.3 as it concerns Macbeth: Thou hast it now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, As the weïrd women promised, and I fear Thou playd’st most foully for ’t . . . (1-3)Banquo then turns his mind – and the attention of the play – to the second part of that momentous prediction “that myself should be the root and father | Of many kings” (5-6). His thoughts of the future are interrupted by the formal entrance of the new king and queen and their attendants. Macbeth’s graciousness and dismissal of rumor almost disguise the true import of his ominous questions to Banquo: “Ride you this afternoon?” and “Goes Fleance with you?” (19 and 37). Left alone, Macbeth begins a long and anguished soliloquy (49-73), which like Banquo’s interrupted meditation at the beginning of the scene directs the play’s action towards the Banquo part of the witches’ prediction – “They hailed him father to a line of kings” (61). The resulting compound of fear, anger, and self-rebuke plunges us deep into Macbeth’s fascinating complexity. At once he admires and fears Banquo for “that dauntless temper of his mind” and the “wisdom that doth guide his valor” (53-54) and feels rebuked by his excellence, potency, and destiny. Indeed, Macbeth’s soliloquy becomes simultaneously the verbal equivalent and prefiguration of Banquo’s assassination – “Our fears in Banquo | Stick deep” (50-51) – even as Macbeth acknowledges the terrible futility of his own crime and the impotency of his royal power in the face of Banquo’s lineage and the witches’s fateful vision of the future. Biology and political power both fail him; the “barren scepter” represents an impotence of rod of state and phallus. And the “fruitless crown” the witches placed upon his head symbolizes the bitter barrenness of Lady Macbeth’s political desires at the expense of their moral and dynastic potency. “Hie thee hither,” Lady Macbeth had proclaimed in 1.5, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, And chastise with the valor of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crowned withal. (1.5.24-28)But the “spirits” have not proved enlivening, the crown is “fruitless,” and the chastisement of her tongue brings only fear and loathing. But what makes the speech especially compelling and terrifying and raises it to tragic status beyond and above the mix of fear and futility, is the searing anger, the violent sense of having been cheated, the embittering irony, that fuses with Macbeth’s recognition of what he has destroyed: For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind; For them, the gracious Duncan have I murdered, Put rancors in the vessel of my peace Only for them. . . . (66-69)He acknowledges that he has given his very soul – “mine eternal jewel” – to the devil – “the common enemy of man” (69-70). This clear recognition of his moral degradation might alone serve as the final recognition of a great, Doctor Faustus-like tragedy, but here, midway in Shakespeare’s trajectory, the mixture of recognition and rage drives this play on towards its ominous second half. This combination of fearsome dangerousness and tortured self-recognition deepens our response to Macbeth towards a kind of tragic resonance. Certainly, we do not see Macbeth in the admiring or partisan perspective of a Hamlet or an Antigone, but we are, I believe, fascinated by the scale and seriousness of his response to his burgeoning criminality. I know from having taught and responded to the greatest tragedies – Oedipus, Othello, King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi – that the most serious and affective response to a major tragic character is surely not one of liking or disliking – those are domestic, undramatic, and untragic emotions best reserved for neighbors and mild acquaintances. The contradictory and difficult emotions that great tragedy raises and probes are more those of “fear” and “pity,” to use the terminology of tragedy’s earliest and greatest theoretician, Aristotle (who wrote analytically in the 4th- century BC about the great Athenian tragedies of the preceding century). We are drawn empathetically towards the character through a sense of pity and recognition of mutual human flaws even as we are distanced by the fear and awe that are manifestations of the artistic heightenings and concentrations of classical tragedy. Serious tragedy is created out of this dynamic of sympathetic attraction and fascinated rejection. Macbeth’s response to the nasty irony of fate at the end of his soliloquy is couched in old-fashioned chivalric terms; he offers fate trial by single combat even to the death: “come Fate into the list, | And champion me to th’utterance” (72-73). But the sleazy entangling of the “two murders” which immediately follows is anything but brave or noble. He becomes a surrogate witch, using lies and flattery to seduce these desperate men to do evil. Shakespeare specifically recalls the witches’ temptation of Macbeth himself by having Macbeth use the very phrase “made good” that Banquo had employed earlier in the scene (8) when talking about the fulfillment of the witches’ prophecy toward Macbeth. When Laurence Olivier performed this scene at London’s Old Vic in 1937, he stood in deep shadow upstage and controlled the frightened, grovelling, ragged men like a master, cynical puppeteer. Certainly, Macbeth’s scorn for the men is evident in his barely disguised mix of hypocrisy and intimidation, as it is in his lavish “catalogue” of dog imagery (91ff) by which he contemptuously places them at a low and bestial level on the “great chain of being.” This interchange represents a coarsening change in Macbeth and in our attitudes towards him, though it is prefigured in his dismissive remarks on Duncan’s murdered grooms. Ultimately, however, Macbeth’s hateful manipulation and scorn is self-directed; he, not the grooms of the king’s chamber or the suborned men, is the true slaughterer – and he knows it. The scene’s concluding rhyme (which is a customary flourish at the end of Shakespeare’s blank verse scenes) is used here to convey particular callousness: It is concluded. Banquo, thy soul’s flight, If it find heaven, must find it out tonight. (141-142)The scene ends with the verse equivalent of a dismissive snap of the finger. : Voyager mPalex m oVoyager o úPalex ú ûVoyager û ΔPalex Δ »Voyager »tPalex tuPalex u~Palex ~Palex œPalex œ–Voyager –√Palex √≈Voyager ≈ÓPalex ÓVoyager Palex Voyager GPalex GIVoyager IsPalex suVoyager u )Palex ) *Voyager *
