Shakespeares Tragic Villain

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"Shakespeare's Tragic Villain," in Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, edited by Laurence Lerner, 1963. Reprint Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 180-90.

In the following excerpt, Booth discusses the dramatic technique Shakespeare used in portraying Macbeth as a sympathetic tragic hero, a matter also considered by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1918), Robert B. Heilman (1966), and Bertrand Evans (1979). Booth argues that the testimony of other characters and Macbeth's own moral vacillations presented early in the play suggest that Macbeth "is not a naturally evil man, but a man who has every potentiality for goodness." Booth also points out the effect that Macbeth's limited role in the on-stage murders has on his sympathetic portrayal. Duncan's death, he observes, is neither represented nor narrated, and the murders of Banquo and Macduff's family are committed by others so that " Macbeth is never shown in any act of wicked violence." Macbeth's poetic language, argues Booth, is another element in Shakespeare's successful presentation of the tragic hero, an issue also treated by Bertrand Evans (1979). Booth concludes that the spectator "can feel great pity that a man with so much potentiality for greatness should have fallen so low."

Considered even in its simplest terms, the problem Shakespeare gave himself in Macbeth was immense: take a 'noble' man, full of 'conscience' and 'the milk of human kindness' [I. v. 17], and make of him a 'dead butcher' [V. ix. 35], yet maintain him as a tragic hero with full stature commanding our sympathy to the end. To portray a credible path of moral degeneration is difficult enough in itself; to do so in a form requiring undiminished pity is next to impossible. The attempt would be brash even in fiction, or epic, with all of their additional resources for portraying subtle changes and for building sympathy. But to attempt a moral transformation of such scope in a short play, without muddling the audience's responses, is to court disaster.

One need only consider how rarely authors have achieved tragedy with their sympathetic villains to realize the difficulties involved. In place of the tragic experience offered by Macbeth, one usually finds one or another of the following transformations: (1) The protagonist is never really made very wicked, after all: he only seems wicked by conventional, unsound standards and is really a highly admirable reform-candidate. (2) The abhorrence for the protagonist becomes so strong that all sympathy is lost, and the work becomes 'punitive', as in Richard III. (3) The protagonist reforms in the end, before ever really doing anything very bad (innumerable motion pictures and tragi-comedies). (4) The wickedness is mitigated by comedy, so that the serious conflict between sympathy and moral judgement is diminished (Lolita, The Ginger Man). (5) The book or play itself becomes a 'wicked' work; that is, either deliberately or unconsciously the artist makes us take the side of his degenerated hero against morality (The Marquis de Sade). (6) The spectacle of decay is no longer exploited, as in Macbeth, for its greatest human effects, but these are subordinated to other, 'purer' ends, as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, often deliberately undercuts the pathos of Emma's gradual corruption in order, as he puts it, 'to make the reader dream' rather than weep....

The first requirement, if we are to believe that Macbeth's fall is a genuinely tragic event, is to convince us that he is an admirable man, a man who matters. One way would be to show him, as Fitzgerald shows Dick Diver, in admirable action. But such a leisurely representation is not possible when great moral distance must be travelled quickly by the protagonist, and Shakespeare quite rightly begins with the first temptation to the fall, using testimony of the liveliest possible kind to establish Macbeth's prior goodness. From the beginning, we are given sign after sign that his greatest nobility was reached at a point just before the play opens. But he has already coveted the crown, as is shown by his extreme response to the witches' prophecy. It is indeed likely that he has already thought of murder. In spite of this, we have ample reason to think Macbeth worthy of our admiration. He is 'brave' and 'valiant', a 'worthy gentleman'; Duncan calls him 'noble Macbeth'. These epithets seem ironic only in retrospect; when they are first applied, one has no reason to doubt them. Indeed, they are accurate, or they would have been accurate if applied, say, a few days or months earlier.

This testimony to his prior virtue would carry little force, however, if it were not supported in several other forms. We have the word of Lady Macbeth (the unimpeachable testimony of a wicked character deploring goodness):

Yet do I fear thy nature:

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,

Art not without ambition, but without

The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,

That wouldst thou holily, wouldst not play false,

And yet wouldst wrongly win.

No testimony would be enough, however, if we did not see specific signs of its validity, since we already know of his temptations. Thus the best evidence of his essential goodness is his vacillation before the murder. Just as Raskolnikov is tormented and just as we ourselves—virtuous theatre viewers—would be tormented, so Macbeth is tormented before the prospect of his own crime. Much as he wants the kingship, he decides in Scene 3 against the murder: If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me Without my stir.... [I. iii. 143-44]

And when he first meets Lady Macbeth he is resolved to resist temptation. Powerful as her rhetoric is, it is barely sufficient to pull him back on the course of murder.

More important is the ensuing soliloquy, since stage conventions give absolute authority to any character's secret thoughts. It shows him weighing not only the bad political consequences of his act but also the moral values involved:

He's here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself.

We see here again Shakespeare's economy: the very speech which shows just how bad the contemplated act is builds sympathy for the planner.

Macbeth announces once again that he will not go on ('We will proceed no further in this business' [I. vii. 31]), but again Lady Macbeth's eloquence is too much for him. Under her jibes at his 'unmanliness' he progresses from a kind of petulant, but still honourable, boasting ('I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none' [I. vii. 46-7]), through a state of amoral consideration of mere expediency ('If we should fail?' [I. vii. 59]), to complete resolution, but still with a full understanding of the wickedness of his act ('... this terrible feat' [I. vii. 80]). There is never any doubt, first, that he is bludgeoned into the deed by Lady Macbeth and by the pressure of unfamiliar circumstances and, second, that even in his final decision he is tormented by a guilty conscience ('False face must hide what the false heart doth know' [I. vii. 82]). In the dagger soliloquy he is clearly suffering from the horror of the 'bloody business' ahead. He sees fully and painfully the wickedness of the course he has chosen, but not until after the deed, when the knocking has commenced, do we realize how terrifyingly alive his conscience is: 'To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst' [II. ii. 70-1]. This is the wish of a 'good' man who, though he has become a 'bad' man, still thinks and feels as a good man would.

Finally, we have the testimony to Macbeth's character offered by Hecate:

And, which is worse, all you have done

Hath been but for a wayward son,

Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,

Loves for his own ends, not for you.

This reaffirmation that Macbeth is not a true son of evil comes, interestingly enough, immediately after the murder of Banquo, at a time when the audience needs a reminder that Macbeth is not fundamentally evil.

His crimes are thus built upon our knowledge that he is not a naturally evil man but a man who has every potentiality for goodness. Indeed, this potentiality and its destruction are the chief ingredients of the tragedy. Macbeth is a man whose progressive external misfortunes seem to produce, and at the same time seem to be produced by, the parallel progression from great goodness to great wickedness.

Our response to his destruction is compounded of three kinds of regret, only one of them known in pre-Shakespearian tragedy. We of course lament the fall of a great man from happiness to misery, as in classical tragedy. To this is added what to most modern spectators is much more poignant: the pity one feels in observing the moral decline of a great man who has once known goodness. Perhaps most influential in the later history of drama and fiction, there is the even greater poignancy of observing the destruction of a highly individualized person, a person one knows and cares for. Later writers have tended to rely more and more on the third of these and to play down the first two; one difference between Macbeth going to destruction and the fall of a typical modern hero (Willy Loman say, or Hemingway's Jake) is that in Macbeth there is some going.

But perhaps the most remarkable achievement is Shakespeare's choice of how to represent the moral decline. He has the task of trying to keep two contradictory streams moving simultaneously: the events showing Macbeth's growing wickedness and the tide of our mounting sympathy. In effect, each succeeding atrocity, marking another step towards depravity, must be so surrounded by contradictory circumstances or technical blandishments as to make us feel that, in spite of the evidence before our eyes, Macbeth is still somehow sympathetic.

Our first sure sign that Shakespeare's attention is on the need for such manipulation is his care in avoiding any representation of the murder of Duncan. It is, in fact, not even narrated. We hear only the details of how the guards reacted and how Macbeth reacted to their cries. We see nothing. There is nothing about the actual dagger strokes; there is no report of the dying cries of the good old king. We have only Macbeth's conscience-stricken lament. What would be an intolerable act if depicted with any vividness becomes relatively forgivable when seen only afterward in the light of Macbeth's remorse. This treatment may seem ordinary enough; it is always convenient to have murders take place offstage. But if one compares the handling of this scene with that of the blinding of Gloucester, where the perpetrators must be hated, one can see how important such a detail can be. The blinding of Gloucester is not so wicked an act, in itself, as Duncan's murder: imagine a properly motivated Goneril wringing her hands and crying, 'Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more." Goneril does put out the eyes of sleep ... I am afraid to think what I have done', and on thus for nearly a full scene.

A second precaution is the highly general portrayal of Duncan before his murder. It is necessary only that he be known as a 'good king', the murder of whom will be a wicked act. He must be clearly the best type of benevolent monarch. But more particular characteristics are carefully kept from us. There is little for us to love or attach our imaginations to. We hear of his goodness; we never see it. We know almost no details about him, and we have little personal interest in him at the time of his death. All of the personal interest is reserved for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Thus again the wickedness is played up in the narration but played down in the representation. We must identify Macbeth with the murder of a blameless king, but only intellectually; emotionally we should be attending only to the effects on Macbeth. We know that he has done the deed, but we feel primarily his own suffering.

Banquo is considerably more individualized than Duncan. Not only is he a good man, but we have seen him in action as a good man, and we know a good deal about him. We saw his reaction to the witches, and we know that he has resisted temptations similar to those Macbeth is yielding to. We have heard him in soliloquy, that infallible guide to inner quality. He thus has our lively sympathy; his death is more nearly a personal loss than was Duncan's. Perhaps more important, his murder is shown on the stage. His dying words are spoken in our presence, and they are unselfishly directed to saving his son. We are led to the proper, though illogical, inference: it is more wicked to kill Banquo than to have killed Duncan.

But we must still not lose our sympathy for the criminal. It is helpful, of course, that Macbeth is acting on the basis of a real threat to himself. But the important thing is again the choice of what is represented. The murder is done by accomplices, so that Macbeth is never shown in any act of wicked violence. When we do see him, he is suffering the torments of the banquet scene. Our unconscious inference: the self-torture has already expiated his crime.

The same devices work in the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, the third and last atrocity explicitly shown in the play (the killing of young Seyward, being military, is hardly an atrocity in this sense). Lady Macduff is more vividly portrayed even than Banquo, although she appears on the stage for a much briefer time. Her complaints against the absence of her husband, her loving banter with her son, and her stand against the murderers make her as admirable as the little boy himself, who dies in defence of his father's name. The murder of women and children of such quality is wicked indeed, we feel, and when we move to England and see the effect of the atrocity on Macduff, our active pity for Macbeth's victims—as distinct from our abstract awareness that they are victimized—is at its highest point. For the first time, pity for Macbeth's victims really wars with pity for him, and our desire for his downfall threatens to turn the play into what some critics have claimed it to be: a punitive tragedy like Richard III.

Yet even here Macbeth is kept as little to blame as possible. He does not do the deed himself, and we can believe that he would have been unable to, if he had seen the victims as we have.... He is much further removed from them than from his other victims; as far as we know, he has never seen them. They are as remote and impersonal to him as they are immediate and personal to the audience, and while this impersonal brutality may make his crime worse in theory, our personal blame against him is attenuated. More important, immediately after Macduff's tears we shift to Lady Macbeth's scene, one effect of which is to 'prove' once again that the suffering of these criminals is worse than their crimes.

All three murders, then, are followed immediately by scenes of suffering and self-torture. It is almost as if Shakespeare were following a rule that Aristotle never dreamed of because none of the plays he knew presented this kind of problem: by your choice of what to represent from the materials provided in your story, insure that each step in your protagonist's degeneration will be counteracted by mounting pity.

This technical brilliance would be useless, of course, if the hard facts of Macbeth's character did not offer grounds for sympathy. Perhaps the most important of these, except for the initial moral stature, is his poetic gift. In his maturer work Shakespeare does not bestow this gift indiscriminately. We naturally tend to feel with the character who speaks the best poetry of the play, no matter what his deeds (Iago would never be misplayed as protagonist if his poetry did not rival, and sometimes surpass, Othello's). When we add to this poetic gift an extremely rich and concrete set of characteristics, we have a man who is more likely to compel our sympathy than any character portrayed only in moral colours.... If Macbeth's initial nobility, the manner of representation of his crimes, and his rich poetic gift are all calculated to sustain our sympathy, the kind of mistake he makes in initiating his own destruction is equally well suited to heighten our willingness to forgive while deploring. It could be said that he errs simply in being over-ambitious and under-scrupulous. But this is only part of the truth. What allows him to sacrifice his moral beliefs to his ambition is a mistake of another kind—a kind which is, at least to modern spectators, more credible than any conventional tragic flaw or any traditional tragic error, such as mistaking the identity of a brother or not knowing that one's wife is one's mother. Macbeth knows what he is doing, yet he does not know. He knows the immorality of the act, but he has no conception of the effects of the act on himself or his surroundings. Accustomed to heroic killing, in battle, and having valorously 'carv'd out his passage' with 'bloody execution' [I. ii. 18-19] many times previously, he misunderstands what will be the effect on his own character if he tries to carve out his passage in civil life....

This ignorance is made more convincing by being extended to a misunderstanding of the forces leading him to the murder. Macbeth does not really understand that he has two spurs, besides his own vaulting ambition, 'to prick the sides' [I. vii. 26] of his intent. The first of these, the witches and their prophecy, might seem in no way to mitigate his responsibility, since he chooses wilfully to misinterpret what they say. But to reason in this way is again to overplay the role of logic in our dramatic experience. Surely the effect on the spectator is complex: while it is true that Macbeth ought to realize that if they are true oracles both parts of their prophecy must be fulfilled, it is also true that almost any man could be thrown off his moral balance by such supernatural confirmations. His misunderstanding is thus obvious and dramatically effective and at the same time quite forgivable.

The second force which Macbeth does not understand works less equivocally for our sympathy. While Lady Macbeth fills several functions in the play, beyond her great inherent interest as a character, her chief task, as the textbook commonplace has it, is to incite and confuse Macbeth—and thus ultimately to excuse him. Her rhetoric is brilliant whether we think of it as designed to sway Macbeth or as designed to convince the spectators that Macbeth is worth bothering about....

His tragic error, then, is at least three-fold: he does not understand the two forces working upon him from outside; he does not understand the difference between 'bloody execution' in civilian life and in military life; and he does not understand his own character—he does not know what will be the effects of the act on his own future happiness. Only one of these—the misunderstanding of the weird sisters—can be considered similar to, say, Iphigenia's ignorance of her brother's identity. The hero here must be really aware, in advance, of the wickedness of his act. The more aware he can be—and still commit the act convincingly—the greater the regret felt by the spectator.

All of these points are illustrated powerfully in the contrast between the final words of Malcolm concerning Macbeth—'This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen' [V. ix. 35]—and the spectator's own feelings toward Macbeth at the same point. We judge Macbeth, as Shakespeare intends, not merely for his actions but in the light of the total impression of the play. Malcolm and Macduff do not know Macbeth and the forces that have worked on him; the spectator does know him and can feel great pity that a man with so much potentiality for greatness should have fallen so low and should be so thoroughly misjudged. The pity is that everything was not otherwise. when it so easily could have been otherwise. The conclusion brings a flood of relief that the awful blunder has played itself out, that Macbeth has at last been able to die, still valiant, and is forced no longer to go on enduring the knowledge of what he has become....

Thomson Gale Document Number: EJ2115508137