Macbeth Read Free Page A

CHILDREN?
    Why was King James so interested in witches? The main reason was that his ideology of kingship was closely bound to a cosmology of good and evil. He believed passionately in the idea that the monarchwas God’s representative on earth. The king was the embodiment of virtue, blessed with the power to heal his people and restore cosmic harmony. The idea that the devil was active in the world through the dark agency of witchcraft was the necessary antithesis of this vision. The imagery of Shakespeare’s play creates a pervasive sense of connection between the state and the cosmos: witness those signs of disruption in the order of nature reported by Lennox and Ross on the night of Duncan’s murder.
    Another consequence of James’s theory of kingship was the idea that royal succession was divinely ordained rather than achieved arbitrarily through a struggle between rival candidates or through a popular vote. It is therefore extremely significant that in Holinshed’s
Chronicles
Duncan’s anointing of his son Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland is a turning point in Scottish history: this is the moment when the principle of primogeniture is established in Scotland. In Holinshed, Macbeth is Duncan’s cousin and until this moment he has the right to the succession in the event of Duncan dying before Malcolm comes of age.
    In the mid-twentieth century there was a tendency among critics to mock the Victorian scholar A. C. Bradley for treating Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real people, with a past and a life beyond that which is seen onstage. The shorthand term for this mockery was Bradley’s question, “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” But Bradley has outlasted his critics: to a greater degree than any other writer prior to the flowering of the realist novel, Shakespeare
did
use language to create the illusion that his characters have an interior life and that there is a “backstory” to his plots. The language of
Macbeth
is steeped in images of children, of birth, of inheritance and future generations. The sons of Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff are all crucial to the action, and there is even a telling bit part for the son of the English soldier Siward. No other Shakespearean tragedy has so many significant male children in the cast. Only Macbeth is without a son. Hence his appalled realization that he has a barren sceptre in his hand, that his bloody deeds have been done only “to make them kings, the seeds of Banquo kings.”
    Shakespeare doesn’t usually portray married couples workingtogether as partners. There are moments of exceptional tenderness between the Macbeths. Yet there is an emptiness at the core of their relationship. The play is scarred by images of sterility and harrowed by glimpses of dead babies. Is power in the end a substitute for love, ambition nothing but compensation for the sorrow of childlessness? It has to be assumed that Lady Macbeth means what she says when she speaks of having “given suck” and of knowing “how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me”: we can only assume that the Macbeths have had a child and lost it. Perhaps that is why they channel the energies of their marriage into the lust for power instead.
    Shakespeare is the least autobiographical of great writers, but can it be entirely a coincidence that, a decade before, he too had lost a child, his only son Hamnet, and that in the years since then he had channeled all his creative powers not into a family but into his work, his theater company, and the thrill of those extraordinary occasions when he found himself—a grammar boy from the provinces with no university education—witnessing the King of England and Scotland, with all his court, listening in rapt attention as his words were spoken from the platform of the banqueting hall in the royal palace?
THE WORD INCARNADINE
    The forms of Shakespeare’s verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher