The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Shakespeare · a tragedy in five acts · usually dated about 1606, on internal evidence · scored on the Folio of 1623, its sole early witness, with the Hecate material most editors give to Thomas Middleton; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Tragedy of the criminal conscience; the chronicle history and the Senecan tragedy of blood made one action, seen from inside the murderer
Mythos
The oracle that fulfils itself by being heard; regicide as a breach in nature; the child as the future the usurper cannot have
Phase
From the heath to the head on a pole: a climb to the murder and the feast, then the deed repeated, on Banquo, on Macduff’s house, on the country
Presentation
Drama; five acts, mainly blank verse, with prose for the letter, the Porter, Lady Macduff and her son, and the sleepwalking; read in the Folio text of 1623, the Hecate material of another hand included
Register
From the witches’ rhymed tetrameter to the whispered half-lines of the murder, the Porter’s drunken prose, the Latinate and the plain set in one sentence, and the flat close of “Tomorrow, and tomorrow”
Scale
One marriage, one castle by night, a kingdom under terror; England for one long scene
Governing Proposition
A Scottish general, told by three witches on a heath that he will be king, kills his king in his own castle at his wife’s urging and by the force of his own imagination, and then must kill again to be safe: his friend, a rival’s wife and children, the country. She breaks first, walking in her sleep, and he dies at the hands of a man no woman bore. The wager of the play is that a crime committed to secure a future destroys the power to have one, and that the murderer’s mind can be shown from inside, at the speed of the deed, without losing the dread of what lies outside it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens in thunder on three witches, who name a place to meet Macbeth and leave on an antithesis: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1). The next scene is a battle told, not shown. A wounded captain reports to Duncan, King of Scotland, how his generals Macbeth and Banquo turned back a rebellion and then an invasion, and the report is rough, its metre and sense uneven in the text as it stands. The thane of Cawdor has gone over to the enemy. Duncan orders his death and sends his title to Macbeth. The audience knows of the gift before Macbeth does.
On a heath the witches stop the two generals. They hail Macbeth as thane of Glamis, which he is, thane of Cawdor, which he does not know he is, and king hereafter; they tell Banquo that he will father kings and not be one, and vanish. Then Ross brings the news of Cawdor, and the second greeting has come true. The third begins to work at once, in Macbeth’s mind and nowhere else: “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings” (1.3). He has already pictured a murder, and the picture shakes him until “nothing is / But what is not” (1.3). The prophecy fulfils itself by being heard. At court Duncan thanks him and names his elder son, Malcolm, his heir.
At Inverness Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter, the first prose of the play, and fears that his nature is too kind to take the short way to what it promises. A messenger brings word that the king will sleep in the castle that night. She calls on the spirits of murder to “unsex me here” (1.5), and when Macbeth arrives she has taken the deed into her own hands. The story came from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), which also gave the murder of an earlier king, Duff, by Donwald in his own castle, borrowed here for Duncan. The play is in five acts and mainly in blank verse, with the witches’ rhymed tetrameter set apart from human speech, and it survives only in the Folio of 1623.
Movement II
Duncan is at supper, and Macbeth has left the table to think. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7). He weighs the deed against the bonds it would break, kinsman, subject and host, and sees the pity it would raise “like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast” (1.7). He tells his wife they will go no further. She makes manhood the wager. It was he, she says, who broke the enterprise to her, when “Nor time nor place / Did then adhere” (1.7); “I have given suck” (1.7), she tells him, and she would have dashed the child from her breast sooner than break such an oath. The plan is hers: drug the grooms, use their daggers, lay the blood on them.
In the night a dagger hangs before him in the air and leads him toward the chamber (2.1). The murder happens off stage. What the audience hears is the couple afterwards, in half-lines and whispers: “Did not you speak?” “When?” “Now.” “As I descended?” (2.2). He heard a voice cry “Macbeth does murder sleep” (2.2). He has brought the daggers away with him and will not go back; she takes them in, and returns with her hands the colour of his. He looks at his own. They will not wash clean; rather they will “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (2.2). Then a knocking begins at the gate, and goes on.
The knocking is answered by a drunk. The Porter plays the porter of hell gate and lets in the damned in imagination, among them an equivocator who “could not equivocate to heaven” (2.3). Macduff has come to wake the king, and finds him: “Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple” (2.3). Macbeth kills the grooms before they can speak; Lady Macbeth faints, and whether the faint is true the play does not say. Duncan’s sons fly, and the suspicion goes with them. Outside, Ross and an old man compare the portents: day turned dark, Duncan’s horses eating one another, a falcon killed by an owl (2.4). Macbeth has gone to Scone to be crowned.
Movement III
Banquo suspects, and says so to himself: the witches promised his line the crown. Macbeth, king now, has found that the crown is not enough: “To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus” (3.1). The witches put a “fruitless crown” (3.1) on his head and gave the succession to Banquo’s sons, and it is for them that he has murdered Duncan. He hires men to kill Banquo and his son on the road, and he does not tell his wife. The partnership made in one act begins to be dissolved by it. At evening he hints to her of a deed to be done that night and will not name it: “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th’ rooky wood” (3.2).
On the road a third murderer joins the two, and the play never says who he is (3.3). They kill Banquo; Fleance escapes in the dark. At the feast that follows, Macbeth hears the news at the door and comes back to find his place at the table taken. The ghost of Banquo sits in it, and only he can see it. He speaks to an empty stool before his thanes; Lady Macbeth covers for him, then gives up and sends the guests away in haste. Left alone with her, he states the law the play has been obeying: “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood” (3.4). Macduff did not come to the feast. Macbeth will go back to the witches and make them tell him more.
One scene in this act runs on another physics. Hecate, the witches’ mistress, rebukes them for trading with Macbeth without her, and the scene ends on a song (3.5); she returns at the cauldron with another. Most editors give this material to Thomas Middleton, whose play The Witch contains the songs. It is part of the play as it has come down, and it is the one scene the action does not need. Then two lords speak of the new king in a careful irony, and word comes that Macduff has gone to England, where Malcolm is, to ask the English king for help.
Movement IV
The witches are at their cauldron, chanting “Double, double toil and trouble” (4.1), when Macbeth comes to demand more. They show him three apparitions. An armed head warns him of Macduff. A bloody child tells him that “none of woman born” shall harm him. A crowned child with a tree in its hand tells him he will not be vanquished until “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill” (4.1) shall come against him. Both promises are true and both are traps, and the play will fulfil each inside its own action. Then he asks whether Banquo’s issue will reign, and a show of kings passes before him, Banquo’s ghost after them, a line that will “stretch out to th’ crack of doom” (4.1).
Macduff has fled, and Macbeth will no longer let thought wait on act: he sends men to Macduff’s castle. The scene there is in prose. Lady Macduff tells her son that his father is dead, a traitor who has left them; the boy answers her with a child’s wit, asking what a traitor is and who must hang them, and reasons that the liars are many enough to hang the honest men. Then the murderers come in. The boy is killed on stage, defending his father’s name, and his mother runs out crying murder. It is this slaughter that turns Macduff from subject to avenger. The children of the play, the babe of pity, the child she would have killed, Fleance and now this boy, have become its argument.
In England Malcolm tests Macduff by accusing himself of every vice, lust and avarice and worse. He is lying, to learn whether Macduff is Macbeth’s agent: an equivocation used for good. A doctor tells them of the English king, who cures the sick by his touch, and the play stops to praise him. Then Ross arrives from Scotland. “Alas, poor country” (4.3), he says, and he cannot at first say the rest. Macduff hears that his wife and children are slaughtered: “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?” (4.3). Malcolm urges him to turn grief to revenge, and Macduff answers “He has no children” (4.3), of Malcolm or of Macbeth, the play does not settle which. He must first feel it, he says, and then he will fight.
Movement V
At Dunsinane a doctor and a gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth walk in her sleep with a light, rubbing her hands as if to wash them (5.1). The scene is prose: the verse she commanded is gone. She speaks to her husband of the night of the murder, of the old man’s blood, of the thane of Fife’s wife, of Banquo in his grave, and of a smell on the hand that will not go. The woman who asked to be unsexed now cannot stop washing. The doctor says that the disease is beyond his practice, and that she needs a priest more than a physician.
The Scottish lords go over to Malcolm and the English force, and march for Birnam. Macbeth holds the castle on the strength of the prophecies, and knows what his life has come to: it has fallen into “the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3), without the honour and the friends that should go with age. At Birnam Malcolm orders every soldier to cut a bough and carry it before him, to hide their numbers. In the castle a cry of women goes up, and the queen is dead. “She should have died hereafter” (5.5), Macbeth says, and goes on: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, until life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5). A messenger reports that the wood is moving. “I ’gin to be aweary of the sun” (5.5).
He fights on the one promise left. He meets Macduff and tells him that he bears a charmed life, which no man of woman born can end. Macduff answers that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d” (5.8). The second prophecy has been fulfilled by events inside the action, as the first was, and Macbeth knows that the witches told him the truth in words made to mislead him. He will not yield to be shown to the people; he fights, and is killed. Macduff comes back with the tyrant’s head. Malcolm, hailed King of Scotland, makes his thanes earls, names the dead a butcher and his queen a fiend, reports that she is thought to have taken her own life, and calls them all to see him crowned at Scone. Fleance, whose line the witches promised the crown, does not return; the usurper’s line ends with him.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds less to remove here than in any other tragedy of its author. The play runs from the heath to the head on a pole, and nearly every scene turns the action: the prophecy (1.3), the letter and the invocation (1.5), the argument in which the deed is decided (1.7), the murder (2.2), the Porter, without whom the knocking has no body (2.3), Banquo’s death and Fleance’s escape (3.3), the feast (3.4), the second prophecy (4.1), and the slaughter of Macduff’s household (4.2), which turns a subject into an avenger. What could go is the Hecate scene (3.5) and Hecate’s lines in 4.1, which the action never needs, and, within the long English scene, the passage on Edward’s healing touch, a compliment to the reigning king that halts the play. Together they come to perhaps a twentieth of the text, and they hold the axis off the top.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the act committed to secure a future destroys the power to have one. Macbeth kills for the crown and finds “To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus” (3.1), and the safety he kills for next recedes into a “fruitless crown” (3.1). A crime against the bonds that hold life together, hospitality, kinship and sleep, unmakes the criminal’s own perception: “Macbeth does murder sleep” (2.2), and the wife who asked the spirits to “unsex me here” (1.5) walks at night washing a hand. Imagination is shown as the engine of the crime and the punishment of conscience: “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings” (1.3). A marriage is made a partnership in one act and dissolved by it: “She should have died hereafter” (5.5). Held off the top because the political disclosure is closed by a providential frame, Malcolm and a holy English king, and the witches leave part of the cause outside the man.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Height is reached often, and the register is dread. The ceiling: the soliloquy of 1.7, with pity “like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast”; the dagger (2.1); the murder, its whispered half-lines and the knocking, and the hand that will “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (2.2); “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th’ rooky wood” (3.2); the ghost in Macbeth’s own seat (3.4); Macduff’s “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?” (4.3); the sleepwalking (5.1); and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (5.5), ending in “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”. Almost every scene of the first three acts is elevated. Held a step below the very top because the testing of Macduff in 4.3 runs long and flat before Ross brings his news, the marching scenes of the fifth act are functional, and the cauldron of 4.1 risks the spectacular in place of the sublime.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The plot is an oracle’s plot: a prophecy that fulfils itself by being heard, and a second whose equivocal terms, “none of woman born” and “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill” (4.1), are fulfilled inside the action, by soldiers carrying boughs and by a man “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d” (5.8). Regicide breaks the order of nature, and the play shows it: day turned dark, Duncan’s horses eating each other, a falcon killed by an owl (2.4). The child is the play’s figure and it bears weight: the babe of pity, the babe Lady Macbeth would dash from her breast (1.7), the bloody child and the crowned child of the apparitions, Fleance escaped, Macduff’s son murdered, and the usurper without an heir against a line that will “stretch out to th’ crack of doom” (4.1). The couple have become archetypes and stay particular: “I ’gin to be aweary of the sun” (5.5). Held a step from the top because part of the myth serves the Stuart claim as compliment.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The inheritance is the chronicle history play, with Shakespeare’s own Richard III the nearest precedent, a usurper as protagonist; the Senecan tragedy of tyranny, ghosts and blood; Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose damned man is watched from inside; and the tempters of the morality play. Holinshed supplied the story. The turn is the tyrant made the tragic subject from within. Richard enjoys his villainy and tells the audience so; Macbeth imagines his crime before he commits it and suffers it after, and the soliloquies make the audience share the murderer’s mind while the murder itself stays off stage. The witches are made neither cause nor symbol, and the play will not decide. The stake was real: a sympathetic regicide, written for the company of a king who had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, on the history of his own line. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Encompassed, is that the instruments, the villain protagonist, the soliloquy and the damned man, were already in the field, his own and Marlowe’s: the swerve lies in depth more than in means.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play’s speed is its argument. Macbeth hopes that “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7), and the compressed form shows the deed never done when done: the first half climbs to the murder and the feast, the second shows the deed repeating itself without end, on Banquo, then on Macduff’s household, then on the country. The crucial scenes are set at night, and darkness is the medium of the knowledge. Duncan’s murder happens off stage and is known through broken exchanges, “Did not you speak?” “When?” “Now.” “As I descended?” (2.2), and the Porter’s comic prose turns the castle door into hell’s gate at the moment the deed is discovered. The equivocal antithesis of the first scene, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1), is the grammar of the whole. Held off the top because the English scene (4.3) relaxes into a container, and Hecate’s scene is form without function.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: four centuries of return. De Quincey’s “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823); A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); Freud on Lady Macbeth in “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” (1916); L. C. Knights’s “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (1933), where the play became the ground of a quarrel about method; Cleanth Brooks’s “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness” (1947). The text holds its questions open: who first planned the murder, since she says he broke it to her when “Nor time nor place / Did then adhere” (1.7); whether the witches cause or reveal; who the third murderer is (3.3); whether her faint (2.3) is true; her “I have given suck” (1.7) against Macduff’s “He has no children” (4.3), whose “he” is unsettled. Held below Hamlet and King Lear because the design is clearer than theirs and its questions fewer, and some of them are accidents of the text rather than depth.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is English drama of the early seventeenth century and, through Shakespeare’s reception, the drama of Europe after it. The intrinsic force: the tragedy of the criminal consciousness told from inside, the murderer as the mind the audience shares, in the most compressed shape the tragedy took; it showed that a play could make damnation psychological without losing the supernatural. Held below the top because within its author’s work the larger reorganisation was Hamlet’s, and part of this play’s reach is the general reach of Shakespeare, hard to separate from its own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the play has held the English stage since the Restoration; Verdi made it an opera (1847); Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1865) and Shostakovich’s opera after it (1934) take its name and its plot; Orson Welles (1948), Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood (1957) and Roman Polanski (1971) filmed it; and the name has become the type of the ambitious couple and the guilty conscience.
Score: 9.2 / 10
About four centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives in one witness, the Folio of 1623, probably a theatrical text and possibly shortened, with the Hecate material and the songs added by another hand. The defining form is legible whole, but a text that may not be all that was first played costs about a tenth. Presence has not broken: in print since 1623, through the later Folios and every collected edition since; on the stage since the Restoration; taught throughout the English-speaking world, translated into most written languages, and remade in opera and film. It has outlived its conditions. The Stuart compliment, Banquo as the ancestor of the king, and the king’s own Daemonologie (1597) behind the witches are history now, and the play is not read for them. The widest presence carries it to the upper end of what four centuries can show; the single, probably adapted witness holds it a step below the top.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Command of dramatic verse at its most compressed. Diction is set against itself: “multitudinous seas incarnadine” answered by “Making the green one red” (2.2), the Latinate and the plain in one sentence. Antithesis runs through the play’s speech, from “Fair is foul” to “nothing is / But what is not” (1.3). The half-lines and broken exchanges of 2.2 carry panic in the metre itself; prose is kept for the Porter and for the sleepwalking, where a mind’s disorder breaks the verse; the witches’ trochaic tetrameter, “Double, double toil and trouble” (4.1), sets them apart from human speech. The construction is a dramatist’s: the knocking timed to the washing of hands, the feast staged around an occupied stool. Charged: Hecate’s tetrameters in 3.5, thinner than the witches’ own; the second scene’s report of the battle, whose metre and sense are uneven in the text as it stands; and the quick scenes of the fifth act, which are functional.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Porter’s drunken prose on lechery and the equivocator (2.3) and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow” (5.5); or the witches’ cauldron (4.1) and Edward’s healing touch (4.3). One law governs them: “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood” (3.4), and the double word betrays whoever trusts it. The Porter’s equivocator, who “could not equivocate to heaven” (2.3), is Macbeth’s fate in comic form; Malcolm’s false confession of vice in 4.3 is an equivocation used for good, set against the witches’ for harm; the holy king’s hand answers the witches’ hand. The range is wide, from comic prose to the metaphysical, and it is held. Charged: the Hecate scene runs on another physics, a stage mistress rebuking her servants, with songs, outside the play’s dread; and the providential register of the English scene is looser than the Scottish night.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Many orders, held by one act. Consciousness, the deepest of them, in his imagination and her collapse; marriage, as partnership and estrangement; children and lineage, which are the play’s argument; the state, in kingship, succession, the thanes, tyranny and a realm under terror, “Alas, poor country” (4.3), and the alliance with England; war at the start and the end; the sacred, “Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple” (2.3); the natural order, in sleep, darkness, the birds, the forest and “the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3); history, in the show of Banquo’s kings. They are integrated, not listed: each is a bond the murder breaks. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Swerve, is the scale of a single short play. The common life, labour and the people, appears only in glimpses, in the Porter, the Doctor and the Gentlewoman, and Lady Macduff’s house is the only domestic world beside the Macbeths’.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 9.5. A dread reached at height in almost every scene of the first three acts and again in the sleepwalking and “Tomorrow”; an oracle’s plot whose equivocal prophecies are fulfilled inside the action, with the child as its load-bearing figure; and four centuries of survival from a single witness, in print, on the stage, and remade in opera and film.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 8.8. The first is held because the instruments of the turn, the villain protagonist, the soliloquy and the damned man, were already in the field, Shakespeare’s own and Marlowe’s, so that the swerve from display to conscience lies in depth more than in means; the second by the scale of a single short play, whose common life appears only in glimpses. Next above them, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2: within its author’s work the larger reorganisation was Hamlet’s, and part of the reach is Shakespeare’s at large.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, first printed in the First Folio of 1623, its sole early witness; there is no quarto. It is scored as one play in five acts, the surviving text for performance, read in a modern edited text with spelling modernised. The Folio text is widely held to be a theatrical one, possibly shortened. The Hecate scene (3.5), Hecate’s lines in 4.1 and the two song cues, “Come away, come away” and “Black spirits”, are part of the work as it has come down, and they are credited or charged to the work, not to its first maker; most editors give them to Thomas Middleton, whose play The Witch contains the songs. The play is usually dated about 1606, on internal evidence. The English is Shakespeare’s, with no translation between. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, in modern spelling, and cited by act and scene in the common modern division, with the last scene as 5.8; everything else is paraphrased. The source, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), with its murder of King Duff by Donwald, is not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the line and word counts, the Folio’s own division of scenes in the fifth act, the earliest record of performance, the topical reference of the Porter’s equivocator, and the forms in which the play held the stage between the Restoration and the eighteenth century, are not given.