The psychology of ambition: The great reversal of roles in Macbeth

“ Macbeth (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. ”

“ The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always, is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.
These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition; and to a considerable extent they are alike. The disposition of each is high, proud, and commanding. They are born to rule, if not to reign. They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. ”

“ Macbeth’s better nature—to put the matter for clearness’ sake too broadly—instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts ”

“ His imagination is thus both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister policy which it demands. ”

“ His energy springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind. His blindly rushing forward on the objects of his ambition and revenge, or his recoiling from them, equally betrays the harassed state of his feelings.—This part of his character is admirably set off by being brought in connexion with that of Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate strength of will and masculine firmness give her the ascendancy over her husband's faltering virtue. She at once seizes on the opportunity that offers for the accomplishment of all their wished-for greatness, and never flinches from her object till all is over. ”

“ These lines show unmistakably that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is reached, vanishes, never to return.
The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much skill. ”

“ To regard Macbeth as a play, like the love-tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, in which there are two central characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of Macbeth is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare drew. ”

“ Macbeth is no villain in-grain, like Richard the Third or Iago, revelling in the devil's work because he likes it; but a once noble human nature, struggling but yielding in a net of temptation, whose meshes are wound around him by the visible hand of the Spirit of Evil. ”

“ The most perfect instance of this kind is the Tragedy of Macbeth, in which the character of an ungrateful traitor, murderer, usurper, and tyrant, is made in the highest degree interesting by the sublime flashes of generosity, magnanimity, courage, and tenderness, which continually burst forth in the manly but ineffective struggle of every exalted quality that can dignify and adorn the human mind, first against the allurements of ambition, and afterwards against the pangs of remorse and horrors of despair. ”

“ The reader will readily perceive that different aspects of the theme predominate in the several stages of the play; and if these stages seem somewhat irregular, it must be borne in mind that the present division into acts and scenes was not the work of Shakspeare, but of his editors.
In Macbeth we see a perpetual conflict between the real nature of man, and the assumed character of the usurper. He is “full o’ the milk of human kindness;” loves truth and sincerity; and sets a high value on the good opinions and the sincere friendship of others. ”

“ Either our nature is so much stronger than our training, or our training is so much stronger than our nature, that we decide for good or evil as promptly as a stream decides to run down hill; or our nature and our training are so nearly balanced that we can hardly decide at all.
In Macbeth's case the contest is quite clear and easy to follow. He was ambitious, and his environment had taught him to regard the crown as a glorious and desirable possession. But environment had also taught him that murder, and treason, and ingratitude were wicked and disgraceful. ”

“ The opening chorus of the witches, no less than the bearing of the man himself, warn us that he has long ceased to wrestle with the messengers of Heaven, and that he is now under the dominion of influences that have a different origin. The forces that sway Macbeth as we know him are intellectual rather than moral, and in order to exhibit more effectively that tendency to deliberation which is characteristic of his sex, Shakespeare has endowed him with the most potent imagination, which presents the consequences of conduct as clearly as though the secrets of the future were mirrored in a glass. ”

“ In the tragedy of Macbeth, sensorial illusions are made to play their part with curious physiological correctness. The mind of Macbeth is worn by the conflict between ambition and duty. At last his better resolves give way; and his excited fancy projects before him the fetch of his own dagger, which marshals him the way that he shall go. ”

“ On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the direction of affairs,—appears to assume it even more than she really can, that she may spur him on. She animates him by picturing the deed as heroic, 'this night's great business,' or 'our great quell,' while she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. ”

“ That exaltation in the project which is so entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. ”

“ In this tremendous apostrophe, in which she goads herself on to crime, the woman’s nature is plainly268 seen. Macbeth never prays to have his nature altered, to have any passages to remorse closed up; never fears “compunctious visitings of nature,” nor desires darkness to hide his knife, so that he may not see the wound he makes. But she knows she is a woman, and that she needs to be unsexed, and feels that she is doing violence to her own nature; still her will is strong, and she cries down her misgivings, and resolves to aid Macbeth in his design. ”

“ Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, your murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, “Hold, hold!”
Enter Macbeth.
Great Glamis, worthy Cawdor! ”

“ Their blood is their own. For them, to produce is a way to be alive. They create because they are. They breathe and what do you know, a masterpiece. Their style is wholly identical with their selves. For the genuine critic who is a chemist, their totality is compressed into the least detail. This word is Aeschylus; that word is Juvenal; that word is Dante. All of Lady Macbeth is contained in this word: unsex, that is peculiar to Shakespeare. There is not an idea in the poet, just as there isn’t a leaf on the tree, that doesn’t have its root therein. ”

“ She urges the excellence and dignity of courage, a glittering idea which has dazzled mankind from age to age, and animated sometimes the house-breaker, and sometimes the conqueror; but this sophism Macbeth has for ever destroyed, by distinguishing true from false fortitude, in a line and a half; of which it may almost be said, that they ought to bestow immortality on the author, though all his other productions had been lost:
I dare do all that become a man,
Who dares do more, is none. ”

“ Macbeth holds back troubled, because, though he is as bold as man can be in facing danger, he yet feels that the deed now required of him would take away from him the very character of man; but for his wife, that deed would make of him more than a man. The sophistry of the will, to the aid of which comes the conquering seduction of desire, exercises its irresistible action and the deed is accomplished. ”

“ It is particularly observable, that in Lady Macbeth's concentrated, strong-nerved ambition, the ruling passion of her mind, there is yet a touch of womanhood: she is ambitious less for herself than for her husband. ”

“ Harlots are not the only women who live upon the street. Lady Macbeth's mind has no specialty, no gift that itches to be noticed, no facility save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man she loves and is absorbed in. ”

“ But there is nothing of this spirituality in the character of Lady Macbeth. Her ambition is satisfied with the name of queen, and she cares not whether the obedience of her followers is constrained or voluntary, whether their love is feigned or real. Remorse has no power over her except when she is asleep; and even old Shylock—whose whole character, as has been well said, is a dead letter—might, perhaps, betray similar emotions, if one could see him thus off his guard. ”

“ In a great passion the mind is set upon an object which it idealises beyond the possibility of complete satisfaction, and there is suffering because the will is thwarted and cheated of its ideal. Macbeth's passionate ambition to be a king, encouraged in him by the witches' chant, is an ambition for something that no being a king can satisfy; and the tragedy of his passion lies in the painful effort by which he wins his object and the painful disillusion when it turns to dust.
The passions with which literature deals run side by side with actions that are impelled by ideals. ”

“ This difference in the progress of the ideas is carried out in all the details of the character and destiny of the personages. Macbeth, when once fallen, sustains himself only by the intoxicating influence of the blood into which he plunges deeper and deeper; and he reaches his term, fatigued by a movement so alien to his nature, disabused with regard to the possessions which have cost him so dear, and deriving from the natural elevation of his character alone the force to defend that which he hardly desires any longer to preserve. ”

“ He becomes more callous indeed as he plunges deeper in guilt, ‘direness is thus made familiar to his slaughterous thoughts,’ and he anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, who, for want of the same stimulus of action, is ‘troubled with thick-coming fancies,’ walks in her sleep, goes mad, and dies. Macbeth endeavours to escape from reflection on his crimes, by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past, by meditating future mischief. ”

“ His mind is ‘full of scorpions.’ He cannot sleep. He ‘keeps alone,’ moody and savage. ‘All that is within him does condemn itself for being there.’ There is a fever in his blood which urges him to ceaseless action in the search for oblivion. And, in the second place, ambition, the love of power, the instinct of self-assertion, are much too potent in Macbeth to permit him to resign, even in spirit, the prize for which he has put rancours in the vessel of his peace. The ‘will to live’ is mighty in him. ”

“ This tragedy is alike distinguished for the lofty imagination it displays, and for the tumultuous vehemence of the action; and the one is made the moving principle of the other. The overwhelming pressure of preternatural agency urges on the tide of human passion with redoubled force. Macbeth himself appears driven along by the violence of his fate like a vessel drifting before a storm: he reels to and fro like a drunken man; he staggers under the weight of his own purposes and the suggestions of others; he stands at bay with his situation ”

“ There is a touch of pathos and of tenderness in this silence which has always affected me beyond expression: it is one of the most masterly and most beautiful traits of character in the whole play. [Pg 457]
Lastly, it is clear that in a mind constituted like that of Lady Macbeth, and not utterly depraved and hardened by the habit of crime, conscience must wake some time or other, and bring with it remorse closed by despair, and despair by death. This great moral retribution was to be displayed to us—but how? Lady Macbeth is not a woman to start at shadows; she mocks at air-drawn daggers ”

“ And if she seems invincible she seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world. Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or a ‘fiend-like queen,’ as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. ”

“ Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own child’s brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a stranger’s blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man’s thought, translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. ”

“ Macbeth has become hardened in crime, after having hesitated to commit it, because he knew its character; but we shall see his wife, succumbing beneath the knowledge which she has acquired too late, substitute one fixed idea for another, die to deliver herself from its influence, and punish, by the madness of despair, the crime which she was led to commit by the madness of ambition. ”

“ But he is now fairly entangled in the snares of hell; truly frightful is it to behold that same Macbeth, who once as a warrior could spurn at death, now that he dreads the prospect of the life to come, clinging with growing anxiety to his earthly existence the more miserable it becomes, and pitilessly removing out of the way whatever to his dark and suspicious mind seems to threaten danger. However much we may abhor his actions, we can not altogether refuse to compassionate the state of his mind ”

“ Not merely the different physical powers, but also, and with even a deeper truth, the different mental and moral characteristics of the two sexes in the presence of crime, are here illustrated by Shakespeare with unsurpassable force and delicacy. This is the imaginative theme which his transcendent genius has fastened upon the legend of Macbeth, and there is scarcely a line of the play which can be rightly understood until we realise that the two central figures are, and are deliberately intended to be, the embodiment and expression of the contrasted characteristics of sex. ”

“ The tale of Macbeth and Banquo was borrowed from the legendary history of Scotland, but the interest of the play is not historical. It is a tragedy of human life, intensely real, the soul, with all its powers for good or evil, deliberately choosing evil. The three witches in the desert place, in thunder, lightning, storm, strike the keynote of evil suggestion. The awfulness of soul destruction is felt in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as in no other of Shakespeare’s dramas. ”

“ In spite of, or perhaps because of, its intricacy of motive and super-abundance of incident, it is the most overwhelming of all in its effect on our emotions. Compared with it, "Macbeth" is a simple play, but nowhere does one find a more masterly portrayal of the moral disaster that falls upon the man who, seeing the light, chooses the darkness.
Though first, Shakespeare was by no means alone in the production of great tragedy. ”

“ But no one can read Shakespeare aright who thinks that the men and women who live in our age do not resemble those who lived in his time. Not until we read the Lady Macduff scene carefully can we grasp the kind of woman Shakespeare had in his mind. Then it will be evident that the real criminal in the play is Macbeth, whose conscience warns him that “unnatural deeds beget unnatural troubles,” and who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be influenced, out of connubial love, into an action of which he knows his wife to be incapable of foreseeing the consequences. ”