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Fate, Agency and Issues of Moral Authority in Macbeth Katie Cooper Stephen Flores May 6th, 2011 Shakespeare Term Essay While reading Macbeth I became very interested in the ways in which fate acts within the play and began to wonder if a close examination of the subject will alter the play’s interpretation. Of course the events of the play are in many ways predetermined by the ideas and values that were predominant during the time that Shakespeare was writing. In order to be successful and have his plays preformed and enjoy any kind of success they must conform to certain accepted standards of the medium. In many of Shakespeare’s plays, however, we see him subtly subvert these accepted standards and values for a large portion of the play. We see this kind of subversion happening in Merchant of Venice when Shylock gives his famous, humanizing speech which challenges the preconceived ideas that the theater-going audience had about Jewish people, although in the end Shylock is

punished and the more socially powerful Christian value system is upheld. In Twelfth Night a woman cross dresses and falls in love with a man and has a woman fall in love with her and boundaries of gender identity and heterosexuality are questioned. But in the end, the hetero-normative value system is upheld with the promise of traditional marriages. The murky meaning of Macbeth (I couldn’t help myself on the alliteration), however, seems more difficult to interpret. A part of this difficulty is due to the presence of the witches. Without them, this play would fall more neatly into a category It would be a play about questioning the legitimacy of power, a bit like Richard III. However, I believe that the overarching concept of fate, as it is represented by the weird sisters, gives this play other layers of meaning and questions the notion of the divine right to rule. It is my assertion that the concept of fate in Macbeth operates on two levels, first that it affects the attitudes and

behaviors of the characters in Macbeth, and second that it questions overarching value systems, both in terms of questioning the divine right and the nature of kingship as well as individualism, that in 2 the end bring the play to its inevitable, socially acceptable ending without resolving these value conflicts. Let us begin this exploration as the play opens. The three witches open the play and promise to meet again to speak to Macbeth. Of course the witches are referred to as the weird sisters, and as the footnote in the Norton Edition suggests, the original spelling was wyrd sisters, and this connects the witches with fate in an inescapable way. Each of the three witches speaks three times (the reference to threes is quite likely a reference to the three fates from classical mythology), and then all chant the last couplet which is reminiscent of some sort of mystic chant or spell. As Stephen Regan writes in Texts and Contexts: “The alliterative choric couplet is highly

significant, since it initiates the language of paradox and ambiguity so strongly characteristic of Macbeth. The ‘fog and filthy air’ (11) hint at obscured vision and the torpid atmosphere that engulfs much of the action in the play. ‘Fair’ implies things that are pleasant and beautiful, but also things that are just, which ‘foul’ hints at both dirt and malice (10). The collapse of any firm distinction between these terms anticipates the moral ambiguities of the play.” (92) It is clear that in this scene the weird sisters function as a framing device for the play that sets up certain expectations in the audience about what they are about to see. The audience understands that we are going to be introduced to Macbeth, and that he has some connection to these three strange women. In the next scene, however, the audience’s expectations are not met as we are not introduced to Macbeth. Instead we meet Duncan, Malcolm and various others as they hear a wounded solider speak

about Macbeth and his character is discussed and framed for the audience. His characterization in this scene contrasts greatly from the previous one as Macbeth is 3 hailed as “brave Macbeth”, “like valor’s minion”, “valiant cousin”, “worthy gentleman” (1.21025) and other such descriptions that paint a portrait of a heroic solider This description doesn’t mesh too well with the kind of man who would be the object of attention of a trio of witches. Already Macbeth’s character seems disjointed which cues the audience to pay close attention to this already confusing character. The scene changes again to the witches who are waiting for Macbeth to show up, and when he does they hail him as the Thane of Cawdor and the future king. Of course Macbeth does not yet know that the King has decided to make him the Thane of Cawdor, and thinks being king is just as impossible. When Duncan comes and greets him as the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth begins to grant credence to the

witches prophesies, and his own ambitions begin to blossom. In this scene the witches prophesize Macbeth’s and Banquo’s future and it puts into question the witches’ involvement with the course of events. Are the witches merely prophets who impart to Macbeth their knowledge knowing full well that Macbeth would be unable to change it if he wished, or, by telling Macbeth his fate are they in fact insuring that a certain course of events will take place? In other words, in this scene do the witches function merely as a device for the audience, like the kind of foreshadowing we generally get from soliloquies, or do they function causally and actually exert power over Macbeth and the course of play by speaking with Macbeth directly. Kiernan Ryan writes in Shakespeare: Third Edition: “Whether the prophecies come to pass always depends on Macbeth’s deliberate complicity, although their full significance and consequences are cruelly closed to him. The ‘imperfect speakers’

(I.iii70) of the heath can predict, but they cannot coerce 4 Within the historical bounds of his situation, as he is culturally constrained to perceive it, Macbeth’s fate is the work of his own mortal hands.” (91) Ryan supports this assertion with this interpretation: “The handmaidens of Hecat underscore the fact that Macbeth does indeed fashion his own doom, but does so under conditions which he has neither created nor chosen himself, and over whose ultimate ramifications he has no control at all.” (91) Ryan reveals a very complicated aspect of the nature of fate. Although Macbeth cannot control the circumstances or the ramifications of his actions, he does choose to act which gives him the appearance of agency, although whether that agency is legitimate or not depends on interpretation. There is simply no immediate, clear answer to this ambiguity over the role of the weird sisters and the role of fate in this text. Regan suggests: “Rather than seeing the witches as

palpably evil, we might try to imagine them as the embodiment of all the anxieties, hostilities and fears that so-called civilized society habitually oppresses. Seen from this perspective, the witches become a designated group within a particular social and political order; they signify all that is deviant and perverse according to the prejudices of the ruling elite.” (94) In Macbeth, the only characters that are perverse and strange and exist outside of society are the weird sisters. The rest of the characters fit easily within traditionally defined roles and, for the most part, act in the ways that they are expected to. The obvious exceptions, of course, are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who violate social norms by committing regicide, which is definitely not an accepted, common practice. Macbeth also violates social expectations as he 5 continues to commit murders that are unnecessary, cruel, and break the bounds of honor that he should have as a man as well as a soldier. It would

be simple, however, to write off the witches as agents of evil. It would be easy to say that their role is simply to tempt Macbeth, and by so doing, do in fact cause the actions of the play. As Ryan writes: “Such a reading, however, does not survive a closer textual examination, guided both by historical knowledge of what Shakespeare’s drama was prone to perceive, and by the present objectives of radical criticism” (90). I agree that interpretation is extremely limiting and it seems to me that this overly simplistic ‘forces of good versus forces of evil’ interpretation would relegate Macbeth into the category of a morality play. Regan writes: “Tragedy in the early seventh century took its bearings not just from classical models, but also from a range of more local and immediate influences. One possible source was the Christian ‘morality plays’ of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – plays such as Everyman (c.1500) and Mankind (c1464) – which are essentially

parables of temptation, sin and redemption. It is sometimes suggested that the tragedies written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries owe something of their ethical or didactic emphasis to the earlier morality plays.” (82) Although I agree that it is a reasonable assumption that Shakespeare had been influenced by morality plays, to assume that this accurately describes his purpose or the ultimate meaning of his works isn’t supportable. It is true that Shakespeare’s plays tend to end on a socially normative note that leaves intact the world view of his audience, however, to say that this is the same thing as a religious allegory in which good wins out over evil is to completely deny the scope and relevance of these texts. Since taking the position of viewing Shakespeare as a writer 6 of morality plays is untenable, the answer to the question previously posed about the nature of the role of the witches and fate in Macbeth must lie outside of this narrow interpretation. As

Regan suggests, “If the witches embody the repressed elements of an enlightened society, acting as scapegoats for an ugly set of prejudices, they are also capable of threatening that society by exposing it for the sham it is” (94). The weird sisters, by nature of being witches, are vaguely threatening. Their existence within the play, with their chanting and spell-casting and potion-making, is eerie and unsettling. Yet, other than act strangely, what do they actually do? They tell Macbeth that he will be king and Banquo that his son will be king. If they do have some power over the events of the play and can affect the course or outcome of the play, what is their motivation for doing so? By setting these events in motion they would be exposing the weakness of the system that oppresses them. As Macduff’s son discusses, if power is all it takes to decide what is right and what is wrong then the person who is in power need not be virtuous by nature, just powerful. For the witches,

exposing the hypocritical nature of the society they live in, where an unjust man can decide what’s just, where a regicide wields the same power as a legitimate king, makes sense as motivation. Even before Macbeth kills Duncan, this play calls into question the legitimacy of power. Regan writes: “Macbeth is sometimes seen, in a rather facile way, as a play about the conflict between order and disorder, but the early scenes of the play raise important questions about the kind of order that exists before Macbeth seizes the crown” (95). Macbeth becomes the Thane of Cawdor by defeating an enemy who was himself vying for the throne of Scotland. It is though violence that Macbeth is promoted, and the nature of this violence can only end the physical existence of the person who represented this stark individualistic avarice, leaving these values completely unaddressed. 7 After Duncan gives Macbeth the title of Thane of Cawdor, he tells Macbeth that he deserves more. After one part

of the witches’ prediction had come true Macbeth assumes that Duncan will name him as his successor. Shortly after this Duncan does make an announcement about his succession, but instead of choosing Macbeth he chooses his son Malcolm, which incites an extreme jealousy in Macbeth, who believes that he should have been named the next King of Scotland. His jealousy carries him a long way towards committing regicide As Regan points out, “It is unclear whether Macbeth means to challenge or recruit the workings of ‘Fate’, but his sense of determination appears strained. The opening words of the Soliloquy – ‘To be thus is nothing’ – anticipate the despairing nihilism that descends in Act 5” (108). Macbeth is troubled about the prophesy of the witches. On one hand he is ambitious and wants to be king, but on the other he is afraid of what he will have to do in order to become king. This dilemma is very compelling. Fate once again complicates the issue If Macbeth is going to

be king, if it is truly fated, then he has no choice in the matter, and therefore it would seem that he has no agency. In this way the invisible knife that Macbeth follows to kill Duncan can be seen as the intruding hand of fate. If he has no agency and is compelled by some outside power, like fate or witchcraft, to murder Duncan, then he should never regain his agency. However, after the murder of Duncan we see clear signs of his independence and agency as he stops taking his wife into his confidence as he no longer needs outside forces to make decisions for him. He is clearly in control when he orders the murder of Banquo and his son, as well as the wife and children of Macduff. Whatever role fate takes in Macbeth, he clearly makes his own decisions However, once in power Macbeth does not become a kind a tolerant ruler. He is paranoid, and rightfully so. Now that he knows that the King was not a sacred being who was protected by any sort of divinity or more-than-human power he is

inescapably aware that he too is just a man 8 and afforded no extraordinary protections. This brings us to the question of how fate operates in this play in terms of its overall value structures. Of course understanding these value structures requires context which Regan provides on this subject: “Shakespearian tragedy is similarly poised between the breakdown of older forms of social organization and a new, uncertain future; in some ways, it cannot help but anticipate the political turmoil of the English Civil War (sometimes referred to as the English Revolution). If tragedy served at one level to restore and legitimize the role of the king, it also served to demystify and even degrade the sovereign image. The cultural theorist Franco Moretti argues explicitly that Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy was one of the decisive influences in the creation of a public that for the first time in history assumed the right to bring a king to justice: ‘Tragedy disentitled the absolute

monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Having deconsecrated a king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate him’.” (86) The fact that Macbeth is able to kill Duncan is problematic as it does not coincide with the beliefs that Shakespeare’s audience would have had about kingship: “An audience watching Macbeth in 1606 would have been accustomed to a much more refined and elaborate idea of kingship, strongly informed by claims to absolute power and divine right. In a subtle way, Macbeth draws on conflicting ideas of royal power; it raises uncomfortable questions about succession, about the personal qualities of kings and about what constitutes effective rule.” (98) Duncan, as far as we are aware, is a good king by most accounts. He may be naive and trust too easily, considering that he trusted Macbeth which was a fatal mistake, but everyone around him seemed to respect him. If Duncan was a good king, and a legitimate ruler, then he should have 9 ruled with

absolute power because he had the divine right to do so. If God had chosen Duncan to be king, then how was Macbeth able to murder him while he slept and take the throne so easily? The easiest answer is to again cast Macbeth and the witches into that pit of absolute evil, but this would reduce the whole work to the level of a parable, and Macbeth is far too complex to be so simplistic and so it demands another interpretation. Either Macbeth also had the divine right to rule and fate as it is represented by the witches is an odd mask for some sort of divine plan, which seems unlikely as he is a homicidal lunatic, or there is no divine right to rule and legitimacy is not measured by God but rather some other, human, set of standards. However, once the king is no longer a divine being but a man just like every other man, he is deconsecrated and subject to the same laws and rules as everyone else. Macbeth was first performed around 1606, almost forty years before the English Civil War, and

yet there are these ideas and ideals that are new, different, modern. Regan writes: “King Lear and Macbeth are not just stories about exceptional individuals with tragic flaws of character, but works that emerge from, and respond to, the constitutional and ideological upheavals of the early sixteenth century. They are works written at a time of increasing skepticism about the natural and supernatural order of the universe, and about the social and political order established in close relation to that overarching, hierarchical design. In both plays, tragedy has important social origins and social repercussions; it emerges not from the failings of solitary individuals, but from the interaction of those individuals with prevailing structures of power.” (82-83) 1606 was a time when people were open to new ideas, new ways of understanding things, new kinds of social relationships. Macbeth didn’t fail because the nature of his ambition was inherently evil, or because he was possessed

by evil when he desired the witches prophesy to 10 come true. Macbeth failed because he had to fail to maintain a socially acceptable outcome, in the same way that happened in The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night. Ryan adds “that Macbeth’s fate is dramatized as this man’s subjection to these vicious imperatives, rather than as proof of our collective enslavement to some malign, metaphysical statute, which we are powerless to repeal” (95). For Ryan, Macbeth fell victim to “our selfcentered capitalist culture” (95) in which the individual is all that matters, and it is Macbeth’s failure to act in the interest of anyone other than himself that ultimately leads to his doom. For Ryan, Macbeth was not a victim of fate at all, but rather he was a victim of his own selfish ideologies. In the end, as Macbeth’s head is stuck upon a pike for all to jeer at, the problems of Macbeth as a king (and thus moral authority) as well as Macbeth as a murderous lunatic have been

solved. However, the ways in which the construction of fate within the play has challenged the ideas of the legitimacy of moral authorities as well as “our self-centered capitalist culture” remain after Macbeth has died. True, the physical representation of these challenges to accepted standards has been disposed of, but the challenge remains. Works Cited Regan, Stephen. “Macbeth” Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts Ed Kiernan Ryan London: Macmillan, 2010. Ryan, Kiernan. “Macbeth: ‘For mine own good’” Shakespeare: Third Edition Ed Kiernan Ryan. London: Macmillan, 2002 Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth” The Norton Shakespeare Ed Stephen Greenblatt New York: W.W Norton & Company Inc, 2009 601-682 11