Macbeth Notes

When we first hear of Macbeth, he has just cut an enemy open ("unseamed") from belly button ("nave") to throat ("chops"). The king shouts "Oh valiant cousin! Worthy gentleman!"

Horses go insane and devour each others' meat while they are still alive.

I'm an autopsy pathologist. I am very familiar with how human bodies decompose. To show Macbeth his future, the witches add to the brew "grease that's sweated from the murderer's gibbet." Would you like to know what that means? The bodies of executed murderers were left hanging on the gallows / gibbet, often caged so their friends couldn't take them away, until they were skeletonized, a process that takes weeks. At about ten days in suitable weather, there are enough weak points in the skin that the bodyfat, which has liquefied, can start dripping through. There will be a puddle of oil underneath the body. This is for real.

Macbeth's head ends up on a stick. All teens know that severed heads were probably the first soccer balls. If you are directing the play, this is a nice touch.

In a barbaric era, population pressures made war and even the slaughter of one community by another a fact of life. Survival depended in having a capable warlord to protect life and property, prevent infighting, and protect from distant enemies. Groups of warlords would unite under the nominal leadership of one king to promote their common interests and war on more distant nations. While people pretended to believe in "the divine right of kings" and "lawful succession", continuing effective leadership was assured by warlords killing off the less capable family members.

For some reason, perhaps to give his own Stuart king some more glamorous ancestors, Boece made up Banquo and Fleance. Check out the old Scottish genealogies online. You'll find nobody matching their descriptions.

The three witches remind English teachers of the three Fates of Greek mythology and the three Norns of Norse mythology. "Weird" (as in "weird sisters") used to mean "destiny" or "fate". Perhaps in an older version they were.

Notice that on the morning of the day Banquo gets murdered, Macbeth asks him three times where he is going and whether his son will be with him. Banquo should have been more suspicious. After the banquet, every one of the other warlords in Scotland knows that Macbeth killed Banquo for no good reason, and that he is mentally imbalanced, and that they are themselves in danger. My friend Ian Brown offered an idea that seems ingenious. Much of what goes on in this short play is what is NOT said. In the scene after the banquet, the Macbeths have become distant from one another. They say little of consequence, as in a marriage that both parties know has failed. Brown suggests that Lady Macbeth writes a letter warning her friend, Lady Macduff, about her husband. This explains the appearance of the messenger to warn Lady Macduff just before she is killed -- this episode does not contribute otherwise to the drama -- and afterwards, Lady Macbeth's repetitive writing during her sleepwalking.

Around 1950, scholars noticed and argued the obvious. Macbeth was written specifically to be performed for, and to please, King James I.

Some people will decide that the Macbeths are victims of supernatural forces beyond anybody's control. Other people will decide that the talk about predestination simply reflects the folk-tale, or that the Macbeths' era and/or their outlook on life guarantee that something really bad will happen to them.
Perhaps despite the supernatural trappings of witches and talk about devils, "evil" for Shakespeare is nothing more or less than bad human habits and behaviors.
Lady Macbeth, misogynist, wants to lose her femininity so she can be cold-blooded and commit murder like a man does

Malcolm tells Macduff -- who has just learned about the murder of his family -- to bear his sorrow like a man. Macduff replies he must also feel it as a man does, i.e., he IS a man because he has feelings.
Siward's son becomes a man in his father's eyes the day he falls in battle

People have had lots of fun trying to figure out who the Third Murderer really is. It's evidently somebody who knows Banquo and Fleance. The usual suspects include Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or a servant or thane. All these people are supposed to show up momentarily at Macbeth's dinner party, without bloodstains.

Shakespeare's insight goes far deeper. So far as I know, this is the first work in English that focuses on the isolation and meaninglessness that result from selfishness and cruelty. By the end, Lady Macbeth dissociates from the horror of what she has become. Shakespeare uses insanity as a metaphor for actually gaining insight in "King Lear" and maybe elsewhere. Lady Macbeth's insanity is really nothing more than her realizing the nature and consequences of the horrible thing she has done. Macbeth verbally abuses and bullies the people who he needs to defend him (and who are abandoning him), while reflecting to himself on the emptiness and futility of it all. Of course, the couple no longer has a relationship, and Macbeth is merely annoyed when she dies.

The key question that Shakespeare seems to ask is this. Is human society fundamentally amoral, dog-eat-dog? If so, then Macbeth is right, and human life itself is meaningless and tiresome.
Or do the hints of a better life such as King Edward's ministry, Malcolm's clean living, the dignified death of the contrite traitor, and the doctor's prescription for pastoral care, display Shakespeare's Christianity and/or humanism?
It's a dark play. The light of goodness seems still fairly dim. But evil always appeals more to the imagination, while in real life, good is much more fun.
Is the message of Macbeth one of despair, or of hope?


The dramatic purposes served by Shakespeare’s unique portrait of a compassionate, tender Macbeth, and his adaptation of Kenneth’s eerie story are obvious – who would care to sit through the play if Macbeth were the static character found in Holinshed? Alien voices make for spine-tingling drama, capturing the attention of even the most apathetic audience. But the changes also enhance the thematic content of the play, blurring the line between the two extremes of good and evil within Macbeth himself. His commiseration in the play, and his intense feelings of guilt before and after the regicide clash with his "passion or infatuation beyond the reach of reason’ that propels him to commit the murder. By representing Macbeth’s nature in this way, Shakespeare "rescues Macbeth from the category of melodramatic villain, the kind of character we can dismiss with a snap moral judgment, and elevates him to that of tragic hero .... toward whom we must exercise a most careful moral and human discrimination if we are to do him even partial justice" (Calderwood, 52).

The attention Shakespeare pays to Macbeth’s conscience would have been of particular interest to King James. In his book the Basilicon Doron, written to teach his son, Henry, the ways of morality and kingly duties, James discusses the human conscience at great length, beginning with the statement: "Conscience ... it is nothing els but the light of knowledge that God hath planted in man; which choppeth him with a feeling that hee hath done wrong when ever he committeth any sinne ..." (Basilicon Doron, 17). Certainly Shakespeare was well-acquainted with this short but popular didactic treatise, and, keeping in mind that Macbeth was specifically written as entertainment for the royal court, Shakespeare’s inclusion of Macbeth’s guilty conscience was a way in which he could both intrigue and compliment King James.