The Politics of Aloofness in "Macbeth"
Author(s): JONATHAN BALDO
Source: English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 26, No. 3, Monarchs (AUTUMN 1996), pp. 531-560
Published by: Wiley
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JONATHAN BALDO
The Politics of Aloofness in Macbeth
There is the same method through all the world in general. All things come
to their height by degrees; there they stay the least of time; then they decline
as they rose.
- Owen Felthamr Resolves, XLIX
The King our Soveraigne is lawfully and lineally descended . . . and that by
so long a continued line of lawfull descent, as therein he exceedeth all the
Kings that the world now knoweth.
- The Lord Chancellor, 1608
Jonathan abeth and King James as follows: in the pageants that were an
Jonathan important
important
abeth and Goldberg part King
part
of Jamesof
both sumsboth
as monarchs'monarchs'
up follows: the contrasting in"symbolics
"symbolics the pageants stylesof
of of power,"
power,"
that Queen were "Eliz"Eliz- Eliz- an
abeth played at being a part," whereas "James played at being apart,
separate."1 Displaying "an unmovingness even as he moved through
London," James departed dramatically from the style of his predecessor,
who "offered a show of love in her first display before the people in her
procession through London in 1558/9," and who generally "provided a
mirror of the people s hopes and wishes in her attentiveness to the
pageants, in pressing the English Bible to her bosom after kissing it, in
seemingly spontaneous responses to the words said to her" (pp. 29-32).
By contrast with the Queen who played according to script, as it were,
"James stood aloof; for him to see was enough" (p. 31). In Macbeth
James's elected style of aloofness, imitating "the style of gods," is reflected in the disquieting quietude of Malcolm and in a multitude of
other forms of aloofness. "Aloofness" is an exceptionally complex trope
in the play, and it appears to be the winning style of kingship.
I. Jonathan Goldberg, James land the Politics of Literature (1983; rpt. Stanford, 1989), p. 31.
S3!
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$32 English Literary Renaissance
James's aloofness is intimately tied to his doctrine of legitimism.
Succeeding a childless virgin and coming from Scotland, James empha-
sized lineage in his speech to his first Parliament,2 a strategy, I shall
argue, that produces "aloofness" in many forms. Claiming to trace his
ancestry to the first king of Scotland, Fergus I of the 4th century B.C.,
James believed and caused others to believe that he held the throne of
England by "birthright and lineal descent." In his 1607 address to Parliament, James insisted that the "Kings descent [should be] mainteined,
and the heritage of the succession and Monarchie, which hath bene a
Kingdome, to which I am in descent, three hundred yeeres before
CHRIST."3 He also expressed the hope that his royal line would rule
England "to the end of the world," a wish echoed in Macbeth s glum
response to the Show of Kings, "What, will the line stretch out to th'
crack of doom?" (4.1. 13 2). 4
For Elizabeth it would have been impolitic to draw too much attention to lineal succession, one of the primary motifs of Macbeth , since a
whiff of illegitimacy surrounded her reign from the beginning. Elizabeth cultivated a theatrical style of kingship, in which her legitimacy
was continually reaffirmed not by aloofness but by her theatricality, her
participation in shows of force and of love. As Goldberg maintains,
"The queens legitimacy, the law that justifies her power, is the inheritance from Henry VIII of the show of force and the ability to display the
actuality of power when the show failed to work" (p. 28). Shakespeare's
Elizabethan history plays and tragedies echo her theatrical displays of
power as well as the interrupted and distinctly unlineal successions
characteristic of her family's history. By contrast, Macbeth shares James's
trope of power, lineal succession, and the aloofness that was its natural
issue. His aloofness is refracted and shown in several parts in Macbeth :
those of Banquo, Macduff, the witches, and especially Malcolm. Not
only does he succeed to the throne at the end of the play, but his
eventual succession is mirrored by many other speeches and situations
2. In his opening speech to his first English Parliament, James insisted that a king who
inherits the throne through lawful succession could not be dispossessed. Parliament responded
by declaring him "as being lineally, jusdy and lawfully, next and sole Heir of the Blood Royal of
this Realm." In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies he had written that the people owe allegiance
not merely to the present king but to "his lawfull heires and posterity, the lineall succession of
crowns being begun among the people of God, and happily continued in diuers christian
common- wealths."
3. Charles H. Mcllwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), p. 300.
4. All citations from Macbeth refer to the recent Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Nicholas
Brooke (Oxford, 1990).
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Jonathan Baldo 533
in which he appears in a general way sovereign over the successive. A
mastery over succession from a position separate and apart from it takes
many forms: to name just a few, Malcolm s embodiment of a stable,
universal paradigm of kingship; the witches' foreknowledge of events;
the symbolic exemption of Macduff, the man not born of woman, from
biological succession; and in its most explicitly political form, Banquo s
founding of a line of kings to which he does not properly belong.
Malcolm s mastery over seriality of various kinds, analogous to that of
his playwright as well as of the weird sisters, Banquo, and Macduff, sets
him apart from Macbeth, who is a prisoner of interminable successions
that have no exterior, no end, and therefore no meaning.5 A transcendence of sequential articulation is an essential part of the formula for
political success in this play. Because it is independent of successions of
various kinds, Malcolm s success seems infinitely repeatable, in a succes-
sion that stretches to infinity in the Show of Kings: seems, because
linear, sequential order is challenged by the stuttering and cyclical prog-
ress of speech, action, and, in one of the play s visions of it, history
itself.6
Although the line was James's favored image for the history of his
house and of the countries he governed, it was not the dominant way of
conceiving history in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Partly as an
inheritance from classical historians, cyclical conceptions of history
predominated in the Tudor and early Stuart eras.7 The understanding
of history as either a single cycle or a series of repeatable cycles received
some competition from a degenerative model of history as a continuous
5. Barbara Everett writes that Lady Macbeth sacrifices "to Macbeth s success his succession their hope of children." She usefully discusses shifts in the meaning of "success" as well, in Young
Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford, 1989), pp. 96, 104.
6. See "Shakespeare's Art of Preparation," in Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art
(London, 1 971), pp. 1-95.
7. See the valuable discussion by Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth- Century
English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana, 1986). On the cyclical de casibus pattern
in Tudor history writing, see F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Cal., 1967),
pp. 15fr. On the cyclical form of most Stuart historical writing, see D. R. Woolf s recent The
Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990), pp. 3 if.
Maijorie Garber has much to say about circular temporal patterns in " 'What Past is Prologue': Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare's History Plays," in Renaissance Genres: Essays
on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Lewalski, Harvard English Studies 14 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 301-31. Sigurd Burckhardt discusses rings and circular form in The
Merchant of Venice in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968), pp. 210-1 1. Mark Rose discusses
the "full circle technique" in Hamlet in his Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass., 1972),
pp. 58-60, 124. On the palindromic structure of Hamlet, see James R. Siemon's discussion in
Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, 1985).
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534 English Literary Renaissance
and irreversible decline, a view that also had ample classical precedents.
A third conception, according to which history marked a steady prog-
ress or upward movement, began to emerge later in the seventeenth
century.8
The cyclical model of history, the dominant one for Renaissance
England, was subject to a variety of interpretations. Thus, for Raleigh
the cyclical pattern of rise and fall evident in all the great kingdoms was
providentially ordained, the doleful evidence of "GODS judgments
upon the greater and greatest."9 For others, like Hakewill and Browne,
the cyclical order of history was to be celebrated as evidence of the
perfection of God, commonly described as a circle whose center is
everywhere and circumference nowhere.10 A cyclical view of history
was sometimes put forth to attack the competing idea of history as
inevitable and universal decay. In short, in cyclical accounts of history
the accent could fall on the inevitability of either degeneration or
regeneration.
In spite of this inherent flexibility in the view of history as a cycle(s),
such a view was potentially threatening to a monarch who wished his
line to rule in England "to the end of the world." It is telling that during
the Interregnum, the republican James Harrington alluded to the cycli-
cal view of history to explain the demise of the Stuart dynasty: "the
dissolution of the late Monarchy was as natural as the death of a man"u In
addition, the history of Scotland, including the reigns of both Macbeth
and Malcolm, seemed particularly well-suited to a cyclical interpretation, replete as it was with the pattern of coup and countercoup, seeming evidence of Fortune's wheel at work.12 As Sir Christopher Piggot,
8. See the discussion in Guibbory, pp. 5ff. James's preference seems to have been "none of the
above." Scottish conservatives like James tended to emphasize "the timeless order underlying all
mutation and transience." Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of
James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 46. (Cited in David Norbrook, "Macbeth and the Politics of
Historiography," in The Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth- Century
England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker [Berkeley, 1987], p. 99.) What Shakespeare does
with various kinds of circular movement in Macbeth, it seems to me, is to make them appear to
support the absolutist faith in timeless order, although, like everything else in the play, they
equivocate, and may also (or instead) suggest something like the opposite of an order immune
from mutation and transience.
9. Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, sig. A2v.
10. See Guibbory, pp. I2ff.
1 1 . Cited in Guibbory, p. 1 1 .
12. In what must have seemed a subversive treatment of the Show of Kings, Sir Henry
Beerbohm Tree "turned his figures on a giant wheel where, in visual metaphor, each rose to the
highest before giving way to his successor" (Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth [Berkeley,
1978], p. 523), apparently giving the lie to the promise of an endless lineage promised by the Show,
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Jonathan Baldo 535
an English member of Parliament, said in 1605, the Scots "have not suffered above two kings to die in their beds, these two hundred years."13
The Scottish historiographical tradition was intensely disliked by James
for its record of an elective element in the Scottish monarchy as well as
its frequent advancement of the idea of limited monarchy, as David
Norbrook has recently detailed.14 For those in Shakespeare's audience
who knew that Malcolm turned tyrant and was subsequently deposed,
following a familiar pattern in the history of the Scottish monarchy,
the image of future Scottish and English history as an unbroken, peaceful, and infinite line of descent must have seemed a skewed prophecy
indeed. To those spectators, the shape of history (including Stuart history) might have been better approximated not by the rigorously se-
quential Jacobean line,15 but by the grotesque antic rounds of the
witches, like the one that follows on the heels of the Show, or the
circularity of their order of speech. In addition, as a force for producing
doubling and repetition, cyclicism in Macbeth becomes linked with
and substituting an endless series of cycles more in the spirit of Macbeth 's "Tomorrow" speech. It
is entirely possible that the visual impact of the Show of Kings as it was originally staged may have
been predominantly cyclical. As Nicholas Brooke notes in his recent Oxford Shakespeare edition
of the play (1990), "There is no need for eight actors if they move round backstage and re-enter
with different emblems (depending on the structure of the theatre)" (p. 176).
13. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1957-75), v. 7,
pp. 428-29. Needless to say Piggot and James were not on the best of terms; in his 1607 speech
to Parliament, James said of his native Scotland, "I know there are many Piggots amongst them, I
meane a number of seditious and discontented particular persons, as must be in all Commonwealths" (Mcllwain, p. 301).
14. See Norbrook, p. 92. Buchanan, whose well-known history James suppressed in Scotland and forbade to the published in England, argued that hereditary kingship produced instability, and preferred an elective system of kingship. James of course made precisely the reverse
argument, attributing instability to elective monarchy. Buchanan s attack on primogeniture
instanced a long span of Scottish history, including the reigns of Duncan, Macbeth, and Malcolm, "as illustrating the relative merits of elective and hereditary kingship" (Norbrook, p. 88).
15. The rigorous line of descent imagined for England and Scotland seems to me mirrored
by the plot of Macbeth, in many ways seemingly the most rigorously successive or sequential of
any of Shakespeare s tragedies. Seemingly, for the rigor of the plays causality is largely apparent.
Reading reveals many fissures and inconsistencies in the play s sequences that viewing would
not. See Brian Richardson, " 'Hours Dreadful and Things Strange': Inversions of Chronology
and Causality in Macbeth, " Philological Quarterly 68 (1989), 283-94, for a discussion of "unnatural
arrangements of narrative time" and "distortions of causality" in the play. See Harry Berger, Jr.,
"Text Against Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth," Genre 15 (1982), 49-79,
for a brilliant discussion of other ways in which the play as text functions as a critique of the play
as performance. My reading as a whole is consistent with Bergers argument, insofar as the
deficiencies of Malcolm's success(ion) are mostly revealed through reading, although not exclusively, given Malcolm's relatively weak theatrical presence. A performance of Macbeth might
very well appear to tow the Jacobean line, while a reading of the play could seem highly
subversive of it.
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536 English Literary Renaissance
things disruptive of political order: equivocation, duplicity, opposition,
conflict, and the repeated, cyclical rise and fall of monarchs and dynasties. The Show of Kings, with its incorporation of that important in-
strument of doubling, the mirror, appears to subdue the potentially
subversive sense of history as a series of repetitions and cyclical returns
by incorporating them with the dominant figure of the line. What
could easily be construed as an image of poli tical instability and deterioration, cyclical form, is, in the Show of Kings, reinterpreted as a sign of
political stability and thereby made to serve the interests of the absolute
state wishing to perpetuate itself to the end of the world.
But the Show of Kings is not the plays last word on future Scottish
and English history. It is succeeded by two ironizing commentaries, one
visual and one verbal, both of which begin to let the image of the circle
slip from the control of a lineal and successive order: the grotesquely
mannered antic round of the witches following the Show, and Macbeth s "Tomorrow" speech, whose power as a critical gloss on the Show
of Kings has been inadequately appreciated. Both revive the spectre of a
predominantly cyclical and repetitive view of history, and prophesy that
Malcolm's success, like the success of the Stuart dynasty as a whole, may
be brief as a candle16: further, that the Jacobean formula for how to
succeed in kingship - aloofness - is as replete with equivocation as anything in the play.
II
Malcolm's Jacobean aloofness has been readily apparent to readers and
audiences alike, but certain rhetorical forms of aloofness are more distant, as it were, harder to tease out into the open. After being hailed
King of Scotland, Malcolm proclaims,
1 6. The predominant take on the politics of Macbeth has been, until recently, that the play in
many ways flatters Shakespeare's monarch and patron. See Herbert N. Paul, The Royal Play of
" Macbeth " (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); and, more recently, George Walton Williams " Macbeth :
Kingjamess Play," South Atlantic Review, vol. 47, No. 2 (May, 1982), 12-21. More recently there
has begun what may very well become a trend to read the play in opposition to the Jacobean
line. See, in addition to the articles by Norbrook and Berger already cited, Michael Hawkins,
"History, politics, and Macbeth in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1982),
pp. 155-88; and Alan Sinfield, " Macbeth : history, ideology and intellectuals," Critical Quarterly,
vol. 28, Nos. 1-2 (spring-summer, 1986), 63-77. Sinfield notes that the dominant tendency has
been to read Macbeth in a Jamesian way as "attempting to render coherent and persuasive the
ideology of the Absolutist State" (p. 66). Such readings, according to Sinfield, often proceed
from the mistaken assumption that "other views of State ideology were impossible for Shakespeare and his contemporaries," a view that Sinfield contests largely with the aid of George
Buchanan's writings.
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Jonathan Baldo 537
We shall not spend a large expense of time,
Before we reckon with your several loves,
And make us even with you. My Thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be Earls; the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour nam'd. Whats more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time, As calling home our exiTd friends abroad,
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher, and his fiend-like Queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life; - this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time, and place,
So thanks to all at once, and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crown 'd at Scone. (5.9.26-41)
By the measure of Macbeth and other Shakespearean protagonists, it is
certainly an understated, untheatrical first performance for this new
monarch. The self-consciously epoch-making speech declares the first
earls of Scotland, but its real mastery lies elsewhere. It establishes control over the domain that eludes Macbeth: the various successions of
moments, events, stages of a life, and stages of a discourse. The speech
begins with present business: the establishment of earls,17 what J. L.
Austin would term a performative utterance which allows not so much
as a gap between intention and action, or in other words the condition
which a desperate Macbeth aims for when he says, "And even now, /To
crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done" (4. 1 .148-49), of
his intent to surprise Macduff's castle. It then proceeds in orderly and
linear fashion to two pieces of specific and imminent future business,
then to unspecified and more distantly future action ("And what need-
ful else ...").
This orderly movement through three broad segments of time,
propped up by the organicist metaphor "Which would be planted
17. On ways in which the Scottish historiographical tradition was critical of Malcolms
establishing the first earls, thereby multiplying distinctions of rank where there had once been
equality among the nobility, see Norbrook, pp. 78-116, especially p. 86. It is entirely possible
that this climactic action of the play and inaugural act of Malcolm s realm would have been taken
at least by some members of Shakespeare s audience as a sign of historical decline, not a revitaliz-
ing beginning. On Shakespeare's possible knowledge of Scottish history, see Elizabeth Nielsen,
"Macbeth": The Nemesis of the Post-Shakespearean Actor," Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965),
!93-99- For a skeptical response to Nielsen, see Michael Hawkins, "History, Politics, and
Macbeth" in Focus on "Macbeth" , ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1981), n. 21.
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538 English Literary Renaissance
newly with the time," opposes the spirit of Macbeth s speech by which
he rejects all sense of the sequential and the consequential. In spite of his
rejection of (con) sequence Macbeth makes a powerful bid for consequentiality, and threatens to make Malcolm's apparent command of
sequence and consequence seem a squeaky postscript rather than a
culmination.
She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word. -
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Lifes but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (5.5.17-28)
Macbeth begins by noting an incongruity within the succession of
events: something is out of sequence, namely the news of his wife's
death.18 Furthermore, rather than conveying an orderly succession of
three dimensions of time, Macbeth describes the collapse of three temporal dimensions into an idiot's stammer of one, repeated three times:
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow." His speech may actually reverse the natural sequence of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, if
one allows that "day to day" may serve as an appropriately elusive
reference to the most elusive dimension of time ("to day," the present),
separating those "to-morrows" from the last dimension of time to be
mentioned, "all our yesterdays." The speech features both a regressive,
inverted sequence ("To-morrow ... to day . . . yesterdays"), as well as a
sequence collapsed into repetition.19 In two ways, therefore, Macbeth 's
speech subverts a linear order and succession of the kind captured in
Malcolm's closing lines. Having lost all sense of the sequential, Macbeth
18. Alternately, 11. 17-18 may be taken to signify that position within a sequence is arbitrary.
"She should have died hereafter" may be taken to mean that if not now, she would have died
sometime. Whenever reported, the news of her death would have been equally meaningless,
and the placement of her death within a sequence of events is completely arbitrary.
19. Roland Barthes writes of sequence and repetition as the two principal ways 01 torm- or
structure-making. See "Introduction to the Structural Study of Narrative," in Image -Music- Text,
ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 124.
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Jonathan Baldo 539
has severed all ties with the consequential: all has become a stuttering
tale told by an idiot. Macbeth s tacit wish for an identity of present and
future, implied by his apparent need to act out every imagining that
visits his mind, is ironically consummated in "To-morrow, and tomorrow, and to-morrow."20
In Malcolms lines - "So thanks to all at once, and to each one,/
Whom we invite to see us crown 'd at Scone" - the highly repetitive
thanking of "each one" of his loyal supporters in succession doesn't
suggest an idiot s stammering. The fluid movement between simultaneity, "all at once," and succession, "to each one," suggests a mastery of the
sequential, easily convertible to a nonsequential form. The difference
between expressing thanks simultaneously, and thanking in succession-but also repetitively- suggests something like a reconciliation
between sequence and repetition, not the collapse of sequence into
sameness and repetition as in "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow." Such a reconciliation of sequence and repetition might also
be signalled by the sudden intrusion of rhyme at the end of Malcolm s
speech, which concludes with two couplets (rare in this play, except of
course in the weird sisters' speeches). As if to cast a charm or spell
to try to prevent the potentially demoralizing, not to mention lethal,
effects of doubling and repetition by absorbing repetition into a sequence, the last four rhyming lines of Malcolm's concluding speech are
a seal on the bond between sequence and repetition. Even the oddly
repetitive phrase "by the grace of Grace" may signal such a truce, rather
than echoing the return of the disturbing stammer of Macbeth 's recent
speech, where all sense of sequence disappears.
Precisely such a truce between repetition and sequence is implicit in
the Show of Kings in Act 4, scene 1, presented as a rigorous line of
descent from Banquo to the present King James. In that show Macbeth
remarks on the likeness of the various kings to Banquo and to each
other: "Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first: - / A third is like
the former" (4.1.1 14-15). The last member of the line holds a glass or
mirror displaying the line of Stuarts stretching infinitely into the future,
in a reflection that presumably suggests both the doubling associated
with mirrors and the rigorous sequentiality of the line Macbeth sees in
the glass. If repetition were not so tamed or subdued by sequence, we
20. Cf. General Siwards speech at 5.4.i6if., which opens up a space between present and
future, today and tomorrow, that Macbeth strives to collapse.
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54° English Literary Renaissance
might be tempted to read that Show in the spirit of Macbeth s later
speech: as a demonstration of history as demoralizing and tedious repetition: "a Stuart, and a Stuart, and a Stuart." The marriage of sequence
and repetition that takes place at microscopic levels in Malcolm s clos-
ing speech is therefore an issue of very considerable political importance, and is a reenactment of sorts of a similar marriage in the Show of
Kings.
This may seem an overly theorized reading of a speech that seems
designed not to draw any close scrutiny at all. But Malcolm is presented, or presents himself, over and over again as the embodiment of a
stable, archetypal pattern independent of all sequential articulation, and
therefore in command of all forms of succession. In other words, some-
thing like the conjunction of "all at once" and "to each one" happens
repeatedly whenever Malcolm is onstage. Take Malcolms speech to
Macduff, after he has tested the other s loyalty with a blackened selfportrait and decided to reveal his true character to him. Here it is the
sequence of mental activities that lead up to, and finally issue in, action,
over which Malcolm seems absolute sovereign: "What I believe, I'll
wail; /What know, believe; and what I can redress, /As I shall find the
time to friend, I will" (4.3.8-10). Malcolm presents the transition from
knowledge to action in four successive stages: knowledge, belief, utterance, action. That he doesn't present the four stages successively, or in
proper sequence, is itself telling. Rather, he begins with the two terms
in the middle of the series - belief/utterance - then proceeds, architecturally, first to the anterior term ("What know, believe"), then to the
consequent one ("and what I can redress"). The overall impression is of
a stable paradigm, more spatial than sequential, to govern all vicissitudes
of motive and action.
Malcolm's belief in a profound orderliness not only to the legitimate
succession of kings but also to the mind's operations and the minds
governance of action find their foil in Macbeth, who in an aside following news of Macduff 's flight to England, observes,
Time, thou anticipat st my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment,
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
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Jonathan Baldo 541
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to th'edge o 'th sword
His wife, his babies, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do, before my purpose cool: (4.1. 144-54)
Macbeth both describes and enacts an annihilation of succession at
three distinct levels: the destruction of Macduff's genealogical line; the
collapse of the line of successive stages that, according to Malcolm's
speech, all responsible action must take; and the purported revocation
of temporal succession, of the difference between present intention and
future act. The vow to make thought and action as nearly simultaneous
as they can be - "even now,/ ... be it thought and done" - is a vow to
cancel succession at the level of actions and events, echoing his desire to
put an end to all future political successions.
Presenting an inverted image of himself as a means of testing his protector Macduff, he ventures, "The king-becoming graces, /As Justice,
Verity, Tempranee, Stableness, /Bounty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness, /Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude,/ 1 have no relish of
them" (4-3-9I_95)- Malcolm's self-presentation suggests not only that
the kingly virtues peacefully coexist, but also that they exist in an order of simultaneity, not sequentiality. Macbeth suggests it is otherwise
with a subject, in his protestation to Macduff justifying his murder of
the chamberlains: "Who can be wise, amaz'd, temperate and furious,/
Loyal and neutral, in a moment?" (2.3.106-07). The character of the
subject can be adequately represented only in successive stages.21 Together the two speeches of Malcolm and Macbeth suggest that the
21. This is a premise, by the way, to which the later Shakespeare seems to subject his princes
and sovereigns as well. The earlier Shakespeare, by contrast, tends to present tragic characters
who do not need to be unfolded to us gradually. The integrity of a Romeo or a Brutus depends
precisely on their resistance to change, on their remaining through a series of vicissitudes more
or less exactly what they were at the beginning of the play. Macbeth is the Hamlet or Lear of this
play; Malcolm, the Romeo or Brutus. Although Macbeth s lines are designed to cover up guilt
and explain away the hasty dispatch of the dead kings chamberlains, they also express Macbeth s
fear, which he expresses so forcefully just before the murder of Duncan, of imprisonment within
an endless seriality of events and consequences, without exterior or end. The speech is similar in
this respect to Macbeth s speech a few lines earlier, again designed to mask his guilt but also
serving as omen of its speaker s imminent psychological state: "Had I but died an hour before
this chance,/ I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant/ There's nothing serious in
mortality-/ All is but toys: renown and grace is dead,/ The wine of life is drawn, and the mere
lees/ Is left this vault to brag of" (2.3.93-98).
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542 English Literary Renaissance
character of the subject in Macbeth , unlike the character of the king, is
bound to succession rather than master of it.
It is the sense of being shackled to a rigorous succession of consequences, of causes and effects, that galls Macbeth before he murders
Duncan. In terms of the play s Jacobean line, Macbeth proves his unfitness for kingship by wishing to annul lineal succession, that most
powerful agent of political legitimation for a hereditary monarchy:
If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if th'assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all - here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague th'inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th'ingredience of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. (1.7. 1- 12)
The unsuccessiveness of Macbeth s syntax in these lines, their tortuousness and their uncertain division of sentences or units of grammati-
cal sense,22 obviously reflect his confusion before the murder. They
also signal the unlineal succession of the crown once he wrenches it
from Duncan s line. Macbeth s speech seems an assault on a more wellordered syntax that would mirror a legitimate patrilineal line of succession to the throne. Furthermore, they may reflect Macbeth s impossible
wish for a halt to all future consequences (the meaning of 11. 2-5). In
other words, the unsuccessiveness of Macbeths syntax is both a reflection of the crime he is actually about to commit and a rhetorical reflec-
tion of the conditions he would ideally have apply to his murder, a
halting of the inevitable progress of causes and effects.23
Before murdering Duncan, Macbeth fantasizes about an existence
22. Maijorie Garber discusses the syntax of 1.7. 1-4 in Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London,
1981), p. 105. Nicholas Brooke has an interesting gloss on the syntax of 11. 5-7 in his recent
Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play.
23. His lines about justice provide a further rationale for his tortuous syntax. They suggest
that justice is habitually antimetabolic or chiasmic, reversing the order of cause and effect,
perpetrator and crime, eventually presenting the agent's poison to his own lips. The working of
Justice is already prefigured in Macbeth s convoluted syntax as well as the witches' "Fair is foul,
and foul is fair."
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Jonathan Baldo 543
outside of succession, but it is Macbeth s enemies Malcolm, Banquo,
and Macduff, the three human apparitions that haunt him, who repre-
sent such a seemingly impossible condition. The man not born of
woman, untimely ripped from his mother s womb, Macduff is symbolically lifted outside of genealogical succession by his birth. Although
his strange apparent indifference to the safety of his wife and son disturbs many viewers and readers, it reinforces his status as a being outside
of succession. Macduff's counterpart in the political sphere is Banquo,
who during the Show of Kings in Act 4, scene 1 appears at the end of
the succession of eight kings all resembling Banquo. He is not properly
a part of that succession of kings - he is never King of Scotland himself,
and he appears at the end rather than the beginning of the procession of
kings - although he is the origin of the line. Like King James in his
pageants, he both is and is not a part of the procession or show.24 Having
an existence on its margins, like a playwright, and commanding or
directing the procession from those margins, James s ancestor Banquo is
therefore also the prototype of Malcolm, who is repeatedly represented
as being independent of sequential articulation as well as being sovereign over all forms of the successive or sequential, including the
successions of action and discourse.
Ill
Like Malcolm, the witches seem masterful at making the transition
between orders of succession and of simultaneity. This is apparent not
only in their ability to project a sequence of events from what appears
to be a stationary position beyond succession, but also in the order of
their speech. On the day of Macbeth s "success" (1.5.2) the witches
speak in succession and of succession. They speak in a prescribed
order- 1 . Witch, 2. Witch, 3 . Witch - that is at once linear and circular,
in which a repeated seriality periodically gives way to the simultaneity
of a refrain.
Just as they announce the play s themes of success and succession in
the order of their speech, so do most of their exchanges raise issues of
succession at every opportunity. On the one hand, they seem to possess
foreknowledge of the successive stages of Macbeth s career, the stages of
24. Text and stage direction are in conflict as to Banquo s position in the procession, whether
first or last. See the discussion in Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley, 1978),
p. 520.
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544 English Literary Renaissance
his undoing, or the succession of Scottish kings. On the other hand,
much of what they have to say seems designed to tease us out of
succession. Their first refrain- the first time they do not speak in succession - articulates a coincidence of opposites that precludes narrative
progress or development: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: /Hover through
the fog and filthy air" (i.i.n- 12). 25 Declaring the unsuccess of our
attempts to think Macbeth successively, the line suggests that attempts to
think the plot of Macbeth , or any plot for that matter, foul or fair, tragic
or comic, in terms of narrative succession is doomed to failure. The
equivocating language of the play in general inhibits its own successiveness. The plot and language of Macbeth are therefore at odds with one
another, if we accept that it is the most relentlessly successive of all
Shakespeare's tragedies; the one most directly concerned with legitimizing political succession; and also the most riddling of all the trag-
edies. Riddles pose all sorts of challenges to the mind habituated to
sequential forms of order.
In Macbeth as in Oedipus Rex,26 another play with an unusually rigor-
ous and sequential plot structure, the riddles of the play are riddles
25. Even the succession of the second line from the first is problematic. Is "hover" a
command or a proposal (in either instance, with an anterior subject understood), or a predicate
whose subject is to be found somewhere in the preceding line?
As the antimetabolic line of the witches' riddling refrain, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" chiasmal, and spoken simultaneously by all three witches - suggests a breakdown of discursive
succession at two distinct levels, the order of the speech and the order of the speakers, so does the
ist Witch tell a tale of impeded succession, just prior to their meeting on the heath with
Macbeth and Banquo to speak of their imminent and future successes and successions. It is the
closest the witches ever come to a "full-blown," sequential narrative. Because a sailor's wife has
refused to share her chestnuts, the ist Witch harasses her sailor-husband. The witch apparently
doesn't hold the power of life and death over the sea captain, so the story cannot reach any
decisive conclusion: "Though his bark cannot be lost,/ Yet it shall be tempest-tost" (1.3.25-26).
The story is devoid of climax, although in a literal sense it is nearly all "climax." All she can think
to do is "to do," that is, to repetitively drain the sailor sexually: "I'll drain him dry as hay"
(1.3. 1 9). This stuttering tale is also about lost succession of another kind: the ordinary sequence
of waking and sleeping, together with the sense of temporal progression that the cycle of sleep
and waking imparts. "Sleep shall neither night nor day/ Hang upon his penthouse lid;/ He shall
live a man forbid" (1 .3 .20- 22). The end result is no end result, a shaggy hag story reminiscent of
the second witch's antinarrative description of the battle between the Scottish and Norwegian
forces ("When the batde's lost and won") and prophetic of Macbeth 's "tomorrow" speech, in
which he conceives lives and history itself as endlessly repetitive stories devoid of climax. All are
stories deprived of an issue, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
26. Rosenberg makes glancing reference to the similarity of Oedipus' and Macbeth 's parallel
entrapments by tantalizingly opaque and riddling oracles, but he goes on to detail the later play's
relation to "closer classical precedents" (p. 518). He misses, I think, the extensive network of
questions concerning succession that are linked to riddles in both plays.
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Jonathan Baldo 545
about succession: in Oedipus' case the three stages of a life; in Macbeth s, the three stages of his career. In both plays ternary patterns are
linked to questions of sequence and of political succession.27 The riddle
of the sphinx lays out three stages that Oedipus makes simultaneous,
through both his marriage to Jocasta and his playing several roles simultaneously, in chordal fashion, as when he acts the powerful king, helpless child, and decrepit man simultaneously in the final scene of the play.
The crossroad at which the murder takes place is a visible manifestation
of Oedipus' fate. It spatializes the number three, which appeared to be
associated with succession in the Sphinx's riddle, but is now subdued to
the simultaneous, captured within a spatial, nontemporal image- the
crossroads - which is also the scene of a crime against temporality, leading to a further one against biological succession, in which the successive stages of a life are collapsed into an intolerable simultaneity.
In both plays a riddle issues in political success: Oedipus succeeds to
the throne of Thebes (a succession leading directly to violations against
the naturally successive stages of a life represented in the sphinx's rid-
dle); Macbeth (more passively, to be sure, since unlike Oedipus he is
never called upon to solve any riddle on pain of death) succeeds, in rapid
succession, to the titles Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, King of
Scotland. Both plays also yoke political succession to the question of the
proper succession of thought and action. Kreon 's line, "We need to
before we act," suggests that Oedipus has violated natural orders of
succession in other senses than the biological one. Like Macbeth, the
rash Oedipus customarily tries to make thought as nearly simultaneous
with action as he can, or else to invert the more natural sequence of
thought leading to action; the patient Kreon represents a more natural
succession of action from thought. For both Macbeth and Oedipus,
once a course of action has been conceived (or proposed by someone
else) it is already in progress or even accomplished. Macbeth also shares
with the earlier play the riddle of one man being, in succession and
perhaps also simultaneously, many men. Macbeth asks, "Who can be
wise, amaz'd, temperate and furious, /Loyal and neutral, in a moment?"
(2.3.106-07). And Oedipus says with confidence regarding the rumor
that a band of men murdered King Laios, "One man is not the same as
many men." But of course the clarity ofthat distinction is challenged by
27. Ternary patterns in Oedipus would have seemed a reflection of the ritual circumstances
of that play s performance: performed as part of a competition over a period of three days, and
within a grouping of three plays presented by a single playwright.
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546 English Literary Renaissance
the whole of the play, as well as by the sphinx's riddle, both of which
suggest that "man" can be understood only in terms of the multiple,
dispersed, fragmented, sequential, or syntagmatic.
Although the riddles about succession in both Oedipus the King and
Macbeth issue in success for their protagonists, the very nature of riddles
may be inimical to various kinds of sequential order. The answer to a
riddle is usually achieved not by cautious and deliberate sequential
reasoning but by sudden illumination. Johann Huizinga writes, "The
answer to an enigmatic question is not found by reflection or logical
reasoning. It comes quite literally as a sudden solution - a loosening
of the tie by which the questioner holds you bound."28 And just as
Oedipus inverts the ordinary stages of a human life (like his playwright,
who tells his story backward), so do riddles invert the ordinary sequence of question and answer, as well as configurations of power that
ordinarily hold between questioner and answerer.29 Both the riddle
about the successive stages of a life in Oedipus and the riddle about
the successive stages of Macbeth s career hold out the promise of succession) in a form that in itself subverts succession. In both plays, the
riddles' promises about succession are secretly retracted by the unsuccessiveness of riddles.
The witches do not finally come across as enemies to various kinds of
successive order: they are as much the impartial overseers of succession,
whether of events, causes and effects, or kings. They are the supernatural equivalents of Malcolm, Banquo, and Macduff, all of whom are
stationed at once inside and outside various serial orders. The witches
have a foreknowledge of the successive from a position that appears to
be beyond succession. So does Malcolm oversee various orders of succession, like the sequence leading from knowledge to action, from a
position outside them. The functional equivalence of Malcolm and the
Witches is underscored by the last few lines of the play, which in their
28. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1950; rpt. Boston,
1955), P. no.
29. In the case of the riddle, the questioner holds the answer prior to posing the question,
precisely the reverse of the situation of most interrogatives; the respondent, who in the ordinary
interrogative is presumed to possess more information than the questioner, is in the dark. And
unlike the ordinary question, where the questioner is in some sense subservient to the addressee
who is presumed to know or at least to represent the possibility of knowing, it is the riddler who
is empowered by the question s/he poses, the riddlee disempowered (for instance, in the riddle
contests so prevalent in the Norse sagas, in which failure to answer a riddle correctly could cost
ones life).
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Jonathan Baldo 547
minutest details recall the opening. Malcolm s closing lines implicitly
answer the question posed in the very first line of the play, "When shall
we . . . meet again?" (Answer: At Scone, at my coronation.) The trebled
syntactical pattern of "in measure, time, and place," like many other
such patterns in the play (including "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and
to-morrow"), seems to faintly echo the inaugural instance of such
trebling, "In thunder, lightning, or in rain?" The two closing couplets
themselves echo the Witches' speaking in couplets. And finally, the
penultimate line of the play, "So thanks to all at once, and to each one,"
mimes the witches' speaking alternately "all at once," in refrain, and
"each one," in (and usually of) succession. This echo of the opening
lines by the closing is more than an aesthetic device to bring the play
"full circle": it casts the order of the play as a whole in a league with the
witches,30 who favor cyclical patterns in both speech and movement
(their dances or "rounds"). These cyclical patterns may finally challenge
the stability of the Jacobean "line."
Macbeth wishes for Malcolm's easy commerce between stations in-
side and outside of succession when he dreams of an action with-
out futurity and consequence: "if th'assassination/ Could trammel up
the consequence, and catch /With his surcease success; that but this
blow/Might be the be-all and the end-all" (1.7.2-5). After the matter
of succession is decided in his favor, the childless Macbeth becomes the
inveterate enemy of succession, wishing to murder all tomorrows, all
consequences, all successions to the throne, all futurity. With Macbeth 's
accession some forms of succession are revoked. Not only does the fu-
ture come to seem a drearily repetitive series of tomorrows, but the
ordinary succession of sleep and waking is disturbed, as it was in the
witch's tale of the harassed sea captain.
Mac. Methought, I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep,' - the innocent Sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day s life, sore labour s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature s second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast; -
Lady M. What do you mean?
30. Descriptions of the play tend to be drawn toward images of circularity. See, e.g., James
Calderwood, " 'More Than What You Were': Augmentation and Increase in Macbeth English
Literary Renaissance 14 (1984), p. 80; and Donald W. Foster, " Macbeths War on Time," English
Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), pp. 321-22, 328.
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548 English Literary Renaissance
Mac . Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murther'd Sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'
(2.2.34-42)
The revocation of the natural sequence of waking and sleep (and of
night and day both in Rosse's description in 2.4, and Lady Macbeth s
line, 3.4.126) is reflected in a number of repetitive devices in this
speech: the constant chiming of the word "sleep" and the phrase
"sleep no more," the extraordinary number of appositives, the linear-
cyclical repetition-with-variation of Macbeth's name (MacbethGlamis-Cawdor-Macbeth), not to mention the haunting repetitions of
sounds. A sequential order of thought is also denied Lady Macbeth,
whose actions and speech become fiercely repetitive following her descent into madness: her line "To bed," repeated two, then three, times
(5.1.62-65), and her periodic washing of hands. Lady Macbeth describes her husbands interruption of the banquet (owing to Banquo s
ghost) in terms that suggest a broken order of succession: "You have
displac'd the mirth, broke the good meeting/ With most admir'd disor-
der" (3.4.108-09). Whereas Malcolm will become the scene of a reconciliation of sequence and repetition, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are
the occasion of their polarization. Strenuously resisting sequentiality in
so many forms, they appropriately descend into what the surface of the
play implies may be the only alternative order, twin nightmares of pure
repetition.
IV
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecates team
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream
-Puck, MND (5.1.385-88)
As a number of critics have noted, ternary and binary patterns are
everywhere in Macbeth.31 The numbers three and two would have al31. Among recent examples, see Anthony L.Johnson, "Number Symbolism in Macbeth
Analysis: Quaderni di anglistica 4 (1986), 25-41; Calderwood, 70-82; Luisa Guj, "Macbeth and the
Seeds of Time," Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986), 175-88; Claudia Corti, 'Macbeth': la parola e
l'immagine (Pisa, 1983); and John McRae, " 'The equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth.'
La regia di Macbeth in ' Macbeth' : dal testo all scena, ed. Mariangela Tempera (Bologna, 1982),
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Jonathan Baldo 549
ready come to Shakespeare heavily encoded.32 The number three
would have had direct associations with temporal sequence: Luisa Guj
has argued for the relevance to Macbeth of the iconographie representation of time "in its tripartite sequence of past, present, and future" as a
"frightful tricephalous monster revived from antiquity by Renaissance
iconographers" (p. 76). Shakespeare greatly extended any association of
ternary patterns with sequence, and employed binary patterns in the
play to mark the stalling or blocking of sequential elaboration, whether
of action (through doubling or repetition) or of meaning (in the form of
"equivocation"). The plays elaborate interweaving of ternary and binary patterns seems a powerful ideological issue, as well as a formal or
structural one. The "success" of the whole Stuart dynasty simultaneously recollected and prophesied in the witches' Show of Kings
seems predicated on an alliance between the forms of sequence and
repetition, or in terms of the Show, the line and the mirror: in numeri-
cal terms, two and three. By contrast with this Jacobean marriage of
sequence and repetition, the ternary and binary, Macbeth counts two
and three as rivals- until his "tomorrow" speech, in which the very
difference between sequence and repetition, trebling and doubling col-
lapses. The ultimate collapse of trebling into doubling is (pardon me)
tr/ oubling. Troubling especially for the Jacobean line on history, which
is indirectly challenged by Macbeth s speech.
Since we tend to conceptualize succession - for instance, past, present, and future; yesterday, today, and tomorrow; youth, maturity, and
age - in terms of threes, not twos, it should not be surprising that
Macbeth s career should be expressed in terms of various triads. In his
political career he passes through three successive stages on the way to
the Scottish throne.33 In his second career, as murderer, he commits
three crimes, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, and the
pp. 123-64. For Calderwood triplings in the play belong to a larger pattern of repetition
emphasizing that what has "an appearance of fullness or abundance ... is in fact mere redundancy" (p. 75). Johnson for the most part sees patterns of two and three as similarly "in
opposition to the principle of unity" (p. 37), although he admits a positive meaning for patterns
of three in the play as well: " Threes correspond to cooperation and complementarity in an
enterprise" (p. 37). He misses, I think, the important links between various triplings and
questions of success/succession.
32. On the importance of number symbolism to Renaissance culture, see Alastair Fowler,
Triumphal Forms (Cambridge, 1970); and Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958). The latter is especially helpful in its discussion of various triadic patterns. See
pp. 3óff., 24 iff.
3 3 . The political life of the play in general seems to be under the aegis of three, for there are
three Kings of Scotland in the play, Duncan, Macbeth, and Malcolm.
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550 English Literary Renaissance
murder of Macduff's wife and son. Even the progressive interiorization
of Macbeth s battles seems describable as a triad: according to M.J. B.
Allen, "three stages of Macbeth s future career where combat with a
manifest enemy is succeeded by the melee and carnage of the fight with
the Norwegians, which is in turn succeeded by the hand-to-hand encounter with a warrior who is a psychological projection." Like Macbeth s career, the play also passes through stages of threes, both at its
opening and its close: "A triptych of battle episodes" constituting the
finale of the play, and a "triptych of decriptions" of the battle at the
beginning, "two by the Sergeant and one by Rosse."34 The First and
Second of the Three Apparitions address Macbeth in the trebled form
of "Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!" (4.1. 71, 77), as ifin reference to the
three political roles that have devolved to him in the course of the play.
The triple address also suggests Hecate, the triune goddess. Macbeth,
an adventurer in darkness, has become her male and human equivalent,
Hecate's triune bridegroom. Responding to the Second Apparition,
Macbeth provides a highly visual or apparitional testament to the distinction between two and three, the human/ contestational and the
supernatural/sequential: "Had I three ears, I'd hear thee" (4.1.78).
Beneath the supernatural level which has invaded and taken over
Macbeth 's sphere, implanting its series of sequential threes, we witness
human beings struggling with their binary patterns suggestive of con-
testation and choice. Not only in the Second Witch's description,
"When the battle's lost and won," but throughout the description of the
battles at the beginning of the play there recur certain motifs of doub-
ling. Duncan's enemies seem to be grouped in doublets: manifest
(Sweno) and secret (Macdonwald), foreign and domestic. Fraternal
doubling occurs not only between the two actual brothers in the play,
Malcolm and Donalbain, but also between the new Thane of Cawdor
and the old Thane of Cawdor, the two generals Macbeth and Banquo,
and the two initial enemies of the realm, Sweno of Norway and the
rebel Macdonwald (who like Banquo 's murderers extend their number
to three, to include the Thane of Cawdor, a doubled figure within the
series, since it embraces both the old and new Thane). Speaking of
the conflict between the rebel Macdonwald and the King's armies, the
bloody sergeant reports of Banquo and Macbeth 's twin counterassaults,
34. M. J. B. Allen, "Toys, Prologues, and the Great Amiss," in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed.
David Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20 (London, 1984), p. 8.
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Jonathan Baldo 551
"they were/ As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks; /So they/
Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe" (1.2.36-38).
Doubling takes place not only between characters but also within
characters called upon to double parts, to play two roles to one another,
with the result that characters in Macbeth tend to become living equiv-
ocations. So Macbeth speaks of Duncan, "He's here in double trust"
(1.7. 12)- as his monarch and as his guest. In the bloody Sergeants
description of Macbeths combat, Macbeths and Macdonwalds armies
are painted as two exhausted swimmers clinging to one another, itself a
double gesture of antagonism and support: "Doubtful it stood; /As two
spent swimmers, that do cling together/ And choke their art" (1.2.79). The equipoise suggested by this image of Macbeth and Macdonwald indicates the predominant association of doubled patterns in the
play. Whereas ternary patterns are kinetic and almost always associated
with questions of succession, binary configurations tend to be static.
The meaning of binary configurations is perhaps best encapsulated in
Lady Macbeths doubled exclamation, "Hold, hold!" (1.5.54). All predominantly binary configurations may be said to put the play and its
interpreter into a holding pattern, like Macbeth and Macdonwald
locked in an embrace/grip of life/ death.
The speeches of the three witches often dance in elaborate patterns
around the number three, three to the second power, and three to the
second power doubled. To cite just a few of many instances: [All.]
"Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, /And thrice again, to make
up nine" (1.3.35-36); [1 Witch.] "Weary sev'n nights nine times
nine" (1.3.22); and [1 Witch.] "Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd."
[2 Witch.] "Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whin'd" (4.1. 1-2). Hecate,
Goddess of the Witches, was also called Trivia (tri- + v ia, three ways or
roads), or Diana of the Crossways, presiding as she did over all places
where three roads meet. Trivia is a triune goddess, called Luna as
goddess of the moon, Diana as goddess of the earth, and Persephone or
Hecate as goddess of the underworld, and it is possible that she is a less
trivial character than is ordinarily assumed by critics, who have widely
attributed her to Middleton rather than Shakespeare.35
35. Hecate's threefold nature and function, although it certainly falls into line with the
extensive pattern of trebling in the play, to my mind doesn't necessarily controvert the widely
held view that she is largely or entirely an interpolation by a hand other than Shakespeare's,
although it does challenge it. On Hecate's threefold nature, see Rosenberg, pp. 492fr Luisa Guj,
pp. 183fr. provides interesting evidence to support the idea that Shakespeare "could in fact be
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552 English Literary Renaissance
Establishing the relation of the Witches and their goddess with the
number three early on, the play opens with an exchange whose very
syntactical patterns suggest an association of the supernatural with the
ternary, the human with the binary and (inevitably) oppositional or
contestational:
1 Witch. When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2 Witch. When the hurlyburly s done,
When the battle s lost and won.
3 Witch. That will be ere the set of sun. (i . i . i - 5)
The trebled witches are reflected in the trebled alternatives, thunder,
lightning, or rain. There are numerous other instances of trebled syn-
tactic patterns, as in "And mounch'd, and mounch'd, and mounch'd"
(1.3.5); "I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do" (1.3. 10); the Second Apparitions
urging Macbeth to "Be bloody, bold, and resolute" (4.1.79); Macbeths
"secret, black, and midnight hags" (4.1.48); Malcolms "in measure,
time, and place"; and that most troubled form of trebling in the play,
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow."
The speeches of the Second and Third Witches also set a pattern that
will recur in many forms in the play: of two becoming three, and of a
temporary stationing or suspension (associated with patterns of two)
yielding to sequence (associated with three). The Second Witch's couplet is suffused with doublets of various kinds: "hurlyburly"; the alternatives that are apparently meaningless to the witches, "lost and
won," because they inhabit a sphere above alternatives, choice, suspense, and conflict, all aspects of the binary (and human); the repetition
of "When . . . When"; and the rhymed couplet as a whole that sounds
so much like a martial drumbeat. The Third Witch then stretches that
pattern of two enunciated by the Second, making the couplet a tercet.
It is telling that the third line of the tercet, converting two into three,
returns us from the stationary pattern of "lost and won" to a sense of the
serial or successive by referring to a moment in a recognizable sequence: "That will be ere the set of sun."
The Porter Scene, where a sense of the supernatural yields to a sense
of return to the familiarly human (as in the first two scenes of the play,
where a similar trend from trebling to doubling obtains), provides a
the originator of the idea of a personal intervention by the goddess in the action of the play." She
relates the three-headed queen of darkness to other three-headed figures in the play.
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Jonathan Baldo $ $ 3
mirror image of the pattern of the opening speeches by the Second and
Third Witches. Here the pattern of threes and twos is reversed, config-
urations of three now yielding to two. "Knock, knock, knock" alternates with "Knock, knock," each series being voiced twice (2.3.1 -21).
Three imagined entrants at hell s gate (a farmer, a jesuit equivocator,
and a tailor) reduce to the two who actually enter (Lennox and Macduff). It is three o'clock, as signalled by the "second cock." The three
things that drink provokes yields to two, the number associated with
polarized alternatives and equivocation. The Porter is explaining to
Macduff why he does "lie so late," itself an equivocation or doubling of
meaning.
Mac. What three things does drink especially provoke?
Port. Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and
unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it
makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades
him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to- in
conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.
(2.3.24-34)
In the course of this exchange the triadic pattern yields to a pattern of
two, to binary syntactical patterns explicitly connected to equivocation
or double entendre. The passage from threes to twos is accompanied by a
stalling effect, the speaker s fixation on a single subject. He "holds" the
conversation through a dilated series of binary pairs, linked by copulas.
The to-and-fro motion of these pairs is not unlike that of both of the
speech's principal subjects, copulation and equivocation. This "holding" of sequential elaboration is consistent with other associations in
the play of the binary with stationing, the interruption of sequences.36
Doubled syntactical patterns are often used to suggest hesitation or
stalling before equivocation. In response to the news of a moving grove,
Macbeth says, "I pull in resolution, and begin/To doubt th'equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth" (5.6.42-44). Double-speak leads
to a reining-in of resolution, and consequently to the interruption of
success(ion). Similarly, in response to Lady Macduff's equivocating line,
36. Nevertheless, the number three, closely associated with the witches, continues to direct
things from the wings. The speech takes place at three o'clock, and it ends with a triple
equivocation. The phrase "giving him the lie" means "calling him a liar," "forcing him to lie
down," and "making him urinate," the word "lye" often being used to mean "urine." (Brooke,
Oxford edition, p. 132.)
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$54 English Literary Renaissance
"Fathered he is, and yet he's fatherless" (4.2.27), Ross must break himself free from the staying power of that riddling line, its power to make
him weep and the spell of interruption it, like so many of the plays acts
of equivocation, seems to cast: "I am so much a fool, should I stay
longer/ It would be my disgrace, and your discomfort./ 1 take my leave
at once" (4.2.28-30). Sequence yields to a staying of sorts when Duncan first hears news of Macbeths "success" in battle: "The King hath
happily received, Macbeth, /The news of thy success; and when he
reads /Thy personal venture in the rebels' fight, /His wonders and his
praises do contend/Which should be thine or his" (1.3.89-93). As
the Oxford editor points out, these are "thoroughly confusing lines"
(p. 105): in other words, lines that cause us to share the King's mental
state as we try to unpack his confusing lines about his confusion. Our
minds mime the staying of Duncan s precisely at the moment of greatest
success(ion). Duncan's response to Macbeths success also prefigures
the "surcease" of the moment of success Macbeth himself will try to
achieve. The words "stay" and "stayed" appear in the first encounter of
Macbeth and Banquo with the witches, in response to the doublets,
"So all hail Macbeth, and Banquo," and "Banquo, and Macbeth, all
hail" (1.3.68-69). Macbeth commands, "Stay, you imperfect speakers,"
and subsequently, "Would they had stayed" (1.3.82). Like nearly all
humans in the play, creatures of the oppositional and contestational,
Banquo and Macbeth are experts at "staying." Not so the witches, who
appropriately do not stay, for they are creatures of the ternary and
sequential. Like Ross, who must fight his desire to "stay" and weep, the
play's riddling language causes us repeatedly to stay upon an equivocating utterance even as the action of this remarkably sequential play races
ahead.
The Porter's transformation of patterns of three into patterns of two
reverses the pattern established in the opening lines of the play, where a
doubled syntax and rhyme yield to a trebling, a transformation which is
ominous. It seems* to presage, for instance, the murderers, who begin as
two and subsequently, for mysterious reasons, expand to three. Or
Lennox's lines to Macbeth, " 'Tis two or three, my Lord, that bring you
word,/ Macduff is fled to England" (4.1. 142-43). The Witches' couplet about doubling, "Double, double, toil and trouble;/ Fire burn, and
cauldron bubble," with its hendiadys "toil and trouble" and syntactical
groupings of two ("fire burn," "cauldron bubble"), is repeated exactly
three times at the beginning of Act 4. The many instances of two
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Jonathan Baldo 555
becoming three (of which these are but a few) mirror the play s signal
instance of a failure of two to become three, the humanly sterile Mac-
beth and Lady Macbeth s failure to produce living issue, a failure of
succession at the biological, political, and imaginative levels, since they
have placed themselves in the position of not being able to envision or
wish for a future that is anything but a desperate clinging to the present,
a resistance to any further change once they possess the crown.
Lady Macbeth s pathetically trebled injunction in her madness, "To
bed, to bed, to bed" ($.1.64-65), which follows on the heels of "To
bed, to bed" (5.1.62), suggests the futility of the Macbeths' wishing for
success or succession of any kind. The trebled "to bed," pathetically
echoing the witch's "I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do," both suggesting the act
that might have provided a successor and at some level relieved the
Macbeths from the nightmare of unrelieved repetition, is appropriately
couched in the trebled syntactical pattern associated with succession
throughout the play. "To bed, to bed, to bed," with its troubled and
trebled repetition and threefold use of the preposition "to," is Lady
Macbeths shorthand version of "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow," another series of three that fails to suggest any sense of sequence or succession, any living issue or issue to live for: in short, any
"to-" or "toward-ness."
Macbeth s "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" may represent a cancelling of the difference between three and two, sequence and
repetition, which Macbeth plays off against what is a more positive
embracing of two by three, of repetition by sequence, in the Show of
Kings. "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" suggests that the
difference between two and three has become arbitrary, since the vision
of the future it evokes may be indifferently described as either a dreary
desert of successiveness unrelieved by cyclical returns and renewal, or a
pure repetitiveness unrelieved by succession or syntagmation. Among
other things, it is narrative form that is denied by Macbeth 's speech, as it
was denied by the First Witch's tale in Act 1, scene 3. Narrative represents one kind of succession of the many that threaten Macbeth, this
beneficiary of succession who becomes its enemy at the moment of his
accession. Narratives in general, including the plot of Macbeth , may
represent a marriage of three and two, if a narrative is understood as the
distribution over a syntagm of an essentially binary pair: for example,
high/low, an archetypal pair for the construction of tragedy. But Macbeth is framed by speeches - the witches' at one end and Macbeth 's at
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556 English Literary Renaissance
the other- that challenge the very notion of narrative development, the
seriality of narrative. In Macbeth s great speech, famous for its "staying
power," history itself is a shaggy dog story, and in that same speech a
particular human life is so brief that it seems to lack a narrative or
sequential dimension altogether. Both the individual life and the flow
of history of which it is part are inimical to narration, Macbeth implies.
But viewing a human life as a brief candle, necessarily unsuccessful because unsuccessive or devoid of a successive element, seems a final way of
coping with a failure to succeed by one who, unlike the witches, remains prisoner of successions of various kinds. Macbeth s implication
that all forms of successive order are specious appearances is a way of
attempting to master the successive orders of events by erasing them, by
subtracting the element of succession altogether.
Banquo 's line in the Show of Kings, culminating in the present king,
James I, represents a kind of successiveness that incorporates substitutive
relationships usually associated in Shakespeare with binary pairs, but
without collapsing the difference between doubling and trebling, repe-
tition and sequence, as Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow" does.37 The three weird sisters have already suggested a
reconciliation of trebling and doubling, lineal sequence and repetition,
of the kind realized in the Show of Kings. The three are doubled by the
appearance of a second triad of witches at the beginning of Act 4,
scene i.38 Their most famous refrain about doubling is subjected to
37. The spectacle of eight Stuart kings within a mirror, an instrument of doubling, together
with the bloody image of their fountainhead Banquo, suggests two series, one contained within
the other: eight within nine, or two to the third power within three to the second power. The
number of Stuart kings, arrived at by leaving out of the count James s mother, Mary, Queen of
Scots, seems oddly but carefully calculated to be consistent with other numbers in the Show of
Kings, particularly the investment of some of the kings in the Show with "two-fold balls and
treble sceptres" (4.1. 121), one sceptre and orb to signify the King of Scodand, and two sceptres
and one orb to signify the King of England. A text "hath bubbles, as the water has,/ And these
are of them," as Banquo says of the witches (1.3.79-80). I don't want to ask too much to rest on
the continual bubbling of the numbers 2 and 3 to the surface of Macbeth, especially whenever the
witches appear. It does seem worth reckoning, however, that the Show of Kings, with its
inscription of 8 within 9 - the play's most complex interweaving of 2 and 3 - should take place
within the context of a view of history and succession in which, unlike Macbeth's, the modes of
trebling and doubling, lineal succession and repetition, are wedded. Among other things, the
succession of Stuart kings symbolically incorporates and thereby defuses the potentially deadly
and fratricidal effects of doubling, which Shakespeare explores most thoroughly in one of the
least successive of his plays, Hamlet.
38. The authenticity of parts of this scene is doubtful, and if pressed I would be willing to
drop this bit of numerical evidence. Macbeth plays the numbers so regularly that it isn't necessary
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Jonathan Baldo S 57
a threefold repetition. The circularity of their speech may also be
counted among the signs of a welcome embrace of 2 by 3, of repetition
by sequence, for it mirrors the repetitions or refrains within history,
implied by the endless series of mirror reflections within the Show of
Kings: a view of history, it is important to add, that has a darker reflection in Macbeth s vision of history as an idiotic stammer, a view that the
play, finally, may not sufficiently differentiate from the official Jacobean
version provided in the Show of Kings.
It is characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy to oppose (fraternal)
doubling to (patrilineal) succession and transmission of power. The
effort of Macbeth , perhaps Shakespeare's most cunning piece of propa-
ganda, is to mediate them, though Macbeth s bewitching, creeping
speech on all our yesterdays may hold the power to sever that carefully
negotiated alliance.
V
In keeping with Macbeths status as enemy to the successive - one
who, following the murder of Duncan, wishes history to come to an
end- the play often seems a stuttering series of "amens," attempts to
bring something to a close, which to Macbeth s horror turn out to
be "omens," or projections about the future and therefore about succession. Recounting to Lady Macbeth his effort to echo one of the
groomsmen's "Amens" the night of Duncans murder, Macbeth confides,
One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen,' the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
List'ning their fear, I could not say, Amen,'
When they did say, 'God bless us.'
Lady M. Consider it not so deeply
Mac. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat. (2.2.26-32)
That "Amen," a figure of endings as well as of blessing, is never successfully uttered by Macbeth is indicative of his failure in every attempt
to place bets on a second triad of witches in Act 4, scene 1 . But as it fits a more general pattern of
interconnecting doubling and trebling, there may be cause here for arguing that the second triad
of witches is not necessarily an interpolation, regardless of what one may think about the
authenticity of Hecuba s speeches.
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558 English Literary Renaissance
to halt succession. There are many forms of "amen" in this play, includ-
ing sleep ("Sleep no more"); the sleep that follows "life's fitful fever"
(3.2.23), which seems a blessed "Amen" to the mind stretched on the
rack of "restless ecstasy" (3.2.19-22); Macbeths premature "It is concluded" following the dispatch of Banquo's murderers to their deed;
Macbeth s faux-apocalyptic speech when Duncan s murder is revealed
(2.3.89-94), as well as the more urgent proclamations of doomsday to
the witches (4.1.50-61) and to himself:
I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish th'estate o'th'world were now undone.-
Ring the alarum bell! - Blow wind! come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness on our back. (5.5.49-52)
One of the most arresting forms of "Amen" is that word of arrest,
"Hold!" We might even adopt it as a watchword for Macbeths and
Lady Macbeth s opposition to succession. Although Macbeth says to his
opponent in battle Macduff, "damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold,
enough!' " (5.8.34), Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have essentially been
crying "Hold, hold!" (1.5.54) to succession from the moment ofDun-
can 's murder.39
Not only Macbeth but the play too tries to say "Amen" - and often,
in the middle and later tragedies of Shakespeare, "Amen" sticks in the
throat. The play Macbeth may only appear to be more successful than its
namesake in dislodging "Amen." For in spite of the apparent organic
39. Perhaps the bloodiest versions of "amen," diabolical counterparts to that blessed word of
ending or the arch-blessing that is the sense of an ending, are the first Witch's image of a parent
cannibalizing her children in the context of a recipe for a potion that Macbeth must imbibe in
order to see the apparitions - "Pour in sows blood, that hath eaten/ Her nine farrow" (4.1.645) - and Lady Macbeth s
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (1.7.54-59)
Lady Macbeth 's violent image is somehow appropriate to its subject, the fixity of a promise, for
the destruction of the babe is an image of the abolishment of succession which in another way is
also accomplished by swearing an oath. An oath is an attempt to freeze or fix the mind's
operations, to prevent the ordinary succession of conflicting or simply different intentions,
hesitations, or misgivings. Lady Macbeth 's association with oaths, vows, and other forms of
mental fixity shows her resistance to various orders of succession, similar to that of her husband,
with his fantasy about "trammel[ing] up the consequence" of the assassination.
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Jonathan Baldo 559
unity of the play, Macbeth s speech on all our tomorrows and yesterdays
subverts the carefully contrived sense of an ending that will be delivered
momentarily by Malcolm. "I could not say 'Amen,' " one could easily
imagine the plays Hamlet and King Lear uttering in unison with Macbeth.
"Amen" is so elusive in Hamlet and Lear largely because, like Malcolms
fizzling finale, the concluding speeches of Horatio, Fortinbras, and
Edgar fail to "trammel up" the meanings of those plays, fail to serve as
hermeneutic benedictions. Hamlet is a play that looks like Macbeths
opposite in that causality, at least as it is perceived by characters, seems
so loosely established.
Because the twin problems of succession and causality are worked
out so differently in the two plays, the frequent apocalyptic pronouncements of their protagonists have completely different functions. Macbeth s end-stopped ways of thinking are a means of wishing an end to
the endless, the successions of kings and tomorrows that will make his
own success a qualified one. In Hamlet apocalyptic fantasies cannot
serve as desperate attempts to apply the brakes to the train of causes and
effects, for there is no rigorous sense of "cause" in any sense of the term
in that play.40 Since results (desired or otherwise) in Hamlet are never
achieved by a linear, dynastic succession of causes and effects, apocalyptic thinking may be an attempt to reach by desperate means an endpoint
which is so elusive and inaccessible by ordinary means (that is, through
orderly chains of causes and effects, actions and consequences). Hamlets desperate attempts to imagine a terminus - for example, "I say we
will have no mo marriage" (3.1. 149); or "To be, or not to be" (3.1.56),
aspiring to be the farthest point of thought as well as a speech about
ultimate things, things that come last in a series or progression - are also
a way of positing a causality that cannot be understood in the present
tense. Projecting oneself beyond an imaginary terminus promises to
allow one to see like the "divinity that shapes our ends" (5.2.10). Like
so much else in Hamlet , apocalyptic thinking is a way of going backward, a means of retroactively reading causality into what appeared to
be chance. To put things somewhat differently, end-stopped ways of
thinking promise to keep Macbeth very much in the present tense and
world, but ones from which succession, sequence, and consequence
have been banished. For Macbeth they are a means of holding onto a
40. I develop this argument in " 'His form and cause conjoin'd': Reflections on 'Cause' in
Hamlet Renaissance Drama, ns 16 (1985), 75-94.
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$6 o English Literary Renaissance
tense that is always in the process of vanishing. Furthermore, in Macbeth
dreams of an End are tied to "jumping"- or risking- "the life to come"
(1.7.7). By contrast, apocalyptic fantasies in Hamlet are a means of
imaginatively inhabiting "the life to come" in order to clarify causality
and succession in the present one.
Hamlet , wearing causality like a loose robe, and Macbeth, with its
stuttering series of amens, exhibit quite different anxieties about causality, anxieties that inform the reigns of the respective monarchs under
which the plays were written. The shadows of Elizabeth and James are
cast over the length and breadth of both plays, as the interests and
anxieties of each monarch's reign concerning succession are reflected in
the plays at nearly every level. Hamlet , written in the final years of the
reign of the aged Virgin Queen, when English anxieties about succession were high, enacts such anxieties at nearly every level, including
those of action and discourse. The more rigorously successive Macbeth ,
written toward the beginning of a reign and of a new dynastic succes-
sion, seems to answer to the needs of a monarch who, in a way more
like Macbeth than like Banquo, would like to see both the Stuart line
(or the issue of succession) and the Jacobean "line" on history estab-
lished "to the end of the world."
EASTMAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC
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