Macbeth - William Shakespeare

A recent community theatre performance and subsequent rereading of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth has gotten me thinking. I see play as one of the darkest works in Western literature. Among Shakespeare’s plays, it may be second only to King Lear in regards to its negative view of existence. In addition, like several of the Bard’s creations, it also contains a character, Macbeth himself, of astonishing complexity.

For those unfamiliar with the work the plot is relatively simple. Macbeth and Banquo are Scottish nobleman and generals who serve the Scottish King, Duncan. While returning from battle where they have vanquished Duncan’s enemies, and while crossing a misty heath, they encounter three witches. The apparitions prophesize that Macbeth will soon become King of Scotland. In addition, they predict that Banquo’s descendants will also eventually sit upon the throne.

The prediction tempts both Macbeth and his ambitious wife, Lady Macbeth. They plot Duncan’s murder during an overnight stay at their castle. Though Macbeth hesitates in actually committing the act, Lady Macbeth chides him on. Macbeth does carry out the deed and puts the blame upon innocent parties. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become king and queen.

Next, paranoia prompts Macbeth to send assassins to murder Banquo and his son Fleance. The killers succeed in dispatching Banquo but Fleance escapes. Another encounter with the witches and other malevolent Beings prompt Macbeth to turn on another Scottish nobleman, Macduff. When Macbeth sends killers to Macduff’s castle, the nobleman escapes, but on Macbeth’s orders, Macduff’s wife and children are butchered. As an English army accompanied by Macduff and Duncan’s sons close in upon Macbeth and his forces, Lady Macbeth, now driven insane as a result of acts, commits suicide. In the climatic battle Macbeth is killed and beheaded by Macduff.

I will not attempt any comprehensive commentary on the entire play here, nor will I even try to examine all the aspects of Macbeth’s multifaceted character. I have however been pondering the role that guilt and conscience plays in making Macbeth such in interesting and unique persona. When I think about the ways that guilt and conscience have been handled by various thinkers throughout the ages I am led to the conclusion that Shakespeare has done something very different and exceptional with the character of Macbeth.

Probably the most common, but by no means exclusive form of villain depicted in fiction, long before Shakespeare’s time down through the present, is the “Sociopath”; that is the person who lacks a conscience or any sense of social responsibility. The bad guy commits evil acts and could care less that the deeds are immoral.

Another common archetype in fiction is the person who has committed evil but eventually has an epiphany, usually prompted by conscious or other virtuous thoughts or emotions, and is redeemed at the end of the day. Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge or the Star Wars’s films Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader being obvious examples.

Of course there are characters whose consciences and virtuous emotions prevent them from taking the path of evil early on. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry (Huck) Finn, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, and his dramatic decision to assist his friend Jim instead of siding with the brutal slave culture that Finn was brought up to be a part of, comes to mind.

There are even more permutations involving fictional characters wrestling or not wrestling with their conciseness and guilt. In The Oresteia Aeschylus may be the first of a long line of writers who examine the role of redemption for questionable acts through forgiveness. Another idea, that of a guilty person’s conscious haunting them into self - destruction can actually be found within Macbeth when we look at Lady Macbeth’s fate.

 Macbeth the man fits none of these archetypes. Shakespeare’s creation is racked with guilt and assaulted by his own conscious. He is anything but a sociopath. Like Huck Finn, his better nature throws out red flags before he slaughters Duncan, which is his first act of malevolence.

“Bloody instructions, which being taught, return

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice

To our own lips. He’s here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

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

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off:

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,

And falls on the other. “ 

Unlike Huck Fin however, all of Macbeth’s soul searching is for naught as he goes ahead and commits the regicide anyway.

Later after having killed Banquo, the ghost of his victim arrives to haunt Macbeth who is driven to near madness by the specter. Throughout the play Macbeth is tormented by regret and guilt. Nevertheless he continues down a path of depravity with each act getting successively worse. At the point when he orders the death of Lady Macduff and her children, he even comments that he needs to give the command quickly, for if he hesitates his own better nature might forestall him.

Even at the very end, Macbeth’s very active conscious and awareness of his misdeeds is still with him. As he encounters Macduff, whose wife and children he has murdered. Macbeth comments:

“Of all men else I have avoided thee:

But get thee back; my soul is too much charg’d

With blood of thine already. “

There is however, no redemption here. Macbeth goes down fighting, in a way repentant, as he has been all along, but not redeemed.

To me this facet of Macbeth is fascinating. He completely understands what he is doing morally. It pains him and it tortures him. Macbeth has a moral compass. It would not be exactly correct to say that he ignores that compass, but rather, he disregards it. What is his motivation for the endless chain of murder and brutality?  On the surface he is driven for lust for power, fear and paranoia. Shakespeare also throws out clues that there is more going on. There is something sexual, perhaps things buried within Macbeth’s psyche that ultimately wins out. The unique thing here is that through it all, Macbeth never loses his ability to understand and appreciate that all he has done is monstrous. It is as if a part of him, like the audience, is standing outside of the action and is appalled by what he observes.

This strikes a tone of darkness and nihilism. Macbeth exhibits all the emotions and reactions that we are led to believe that a balanced human being should experience. These affectations and thoughts, in many other fictional works, either lead a protagonist to a path of virtue, or at least result in some degree of redemption or punishment for the antagonist. Yet for all the seemingly noble and “right” aspects of Macbeth’s psyche, neither he nor his victims are saved. Macbeth is killed in the end but it is not his own consciousness that does him in. Even when someone feels the way that they are supposed to feel, sometimes national and personal cataclysms ensure. The picture painted by the great poet here, of the human mind as well as the world that we live in, is indeed very dark.

The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence is a big, brilliant novel that can be described as many things. First, it is a family saga covering three generations of the Brangwen clan. Next, it is a tale of romances as well as domestic strife centering upon the members of each of the generations. This is also a novel of astonishing thematic and philosophical complexity. There are a vast number of intellectual threads developed here. Scores and scores of pages are devoted to philosophical and psychological musings. Lawrence seems to be developing a “Theory of Everything” in this book that encompasses humankind, the universe and God. Finally, the story is filled with incredibly nuanced and complex characters.

The book opens in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tom Brangwen, a young English farmer, meets, courts and eventually marries Polish widow Lydia Lensky. The first third of the The Rainbow details the often tumultuous relationship between the two.

When Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, Anna Lensky, comes of age, she in turn falls in love and marries Tom’s nephew, Will Brangwen. This next generation also experiences a stormy relationship during the early years of marriage.

Anna and Will’s youngest daughter Ursula Brangwen is the focus of the last third of the book. Ursula becomes involved in several relationships including one with another woman as well as another with young army officer Anton Skrebensky. I am in awe of Lawrence for what he has done with the character of Ursula, as I will elaborate on.

This summary sounds relatively simple. However, in the process of mapping out these relationships, Lawrence covers a great deal of ground. First, he describes the enormous passion and equally enormous strife that characterizes all of the romances and marriages. Lawrence devotes pages and pages to these internal battles as well as to detailed analysis of them. He devotes a huge number of words toward analyzing the psychology of these men and women, and even more verbiage digs into the philosophy behind both the relationships and the universe at large. There are so many directions taken here that I would not be exaggerating by saying that I could put up one blog post a week for at least a year dedicated to this book. Lawrence explores human connections, the duality inherent in the universe, the battle for dominance in relationships, varying metaphysical views of God and the Universe, the effects of modernity upon the human soul, the difference between intellectualism and practical happiness, the psychology of sex, and on and on and on!

The characters are complex and multifaceted. Strangely, at times they seem almost more complex than real people! Most possess a lot of admirable traits as well as dark sides to their personas that complement what seems to be a theme of universal dualism throughout the book.

While I stayed away from reading any criticism or analysis of this book up until now, I did read a bit about Lawrence’s personal beliefs and philosophies.  I found expressions of many of these ideas in this novel. However, I was surprised to learn that in his later writings many claim that Lawrence trended toward a pro fascist opinion. I found that set of beliefs to be uncharacteristic of this novel. Furthermore, many contend that Lawrence’s later works have misogynistic tendencies. This is shocking as The Rainbow contains several intelligent, strong, multifaceted and complex female characters. The novel also champions fairly strong feminist themes. If what I have read is accurate concerning the later works, then at some point Lawrence’s thinking took a radically different turn.

The philosophy and themes expressed in this book are indeed radical. This work is paradoxically an attack on both modernity and convention. First, industrialization is portrayed as horrendous evil. Again and again, mines, modern buildings, railroads, canals, etc. are portrayed as blights upon the beauty and the goodness of nature and poison to the human psyche.  Group thinking is excoriated. War, militarism and patriotism are painted as unnatural and harmful to humanity. Democracy and capitalism are also dismissed as being inferior to a system dominated by a landed aristocracy. A rural agrarian society is shown to be ideal.

The attack upon convention is exemplified by Lawrence’s, through his characters, criticism of institutions such as marriage as well as the trend of professionals and tradesman taking on the identity of their title or trade. Individuals who reject society’s restrictions and categories and who retain their natural states of being and thinking are shown to reach true happiness. The book strongly expounds the idea that humans can only reach an ideal if we return to nature and our animal selves and reject oppressive and overbearing modern societies. Lawrence also expresses elitist tendencies as his intelligent and sensitive characters are always keeping themselves apart from the masses and often represented as being unconcerned regarding what outsiders think of them.

Of course, I find these philosophies to be too monolithic. Lawrence practices a way of thinking that I often describe as turning insights into dogma. The modern world has enormous pitfalls and contains terrible strains of evil, but Lawrence fails to see its attributes. However, I believe that Lawrence’s insights, while not universal, are very, very important. The Rainbow was first published in 1915. In what seems like an eerie prescience, Lawrence seems to anticipate the hyper organized societies of Hitler and Stalin, global wars, genocides and mass slaughters of human beings that raged throughout the Twentieth Century. These man made catastrophes were at least partially attributed to the technology, mindless group thinking, militarism and nationalism that Lawrence warned about in this work. In additional he also was a very early voice of caution in regards to the environmental consequences of industrialization that now poses a threat to humans as a species. Lawrence does not directly predict these horrors, but throughout the book there is a sense that something poisonous is building up in our souls and this planet and that there will be terrible consequences for humanity.

I also do personally relate to and agree with some, but not all, of what Lawrence has to say. I, too, strongly distrust nationalism and militarism. Though a firm supporter of democracy, I also share a wariness of the unthinking and fickle masses as well as popular opinion. I am also aghast, as Lawrence was, as to what industrialism has done and continues to do to this planet.

In my opinion Lawrence achieves artistic magnificence when he weaves these themes into a character that is one of the most aesthetically brilliant literary creations of all time. I was not originally going to write much on Ursula in this blog entry, as she is also featured in The Rainbow’s sequel, Women in Love, which I plan to begin shortly. However, I have decided that Ursula is such a dynamic and richly pained character that I must discuss her a bit here. Born of Will and Anna Brangwen, Ursula is anything but simplistic or clichéd. One might expect her to start out as an innocent conformist. This is not the case. Early on she shows herself to be intelligent as well as independent. She fights society’s conventions and restrictions almost from the beginning. She is the first of the Brangwen women to lose her virginity before marriage and at one point takes on a female lover. She bristles at the restrictions that she suffers in a man’s world and sets out to enhance her education and build a career. Interestingly she loves Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, a play that contains another incredibly dynamic and freethinking woman, Rosalind.

But Ursula struggles with herself as well as with society. For a time she works as a teacher under terribly oppressive and constraining conditions, surrounded by petty, mean and small-minded people. Though she attempts to keep her ties to nature, her true self and her soul intact, she feels the situation changing her,

“Yet gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun was being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and saw a luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a fantasy, like a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black and tangled in the teaching, her personal self was shut in prison, abolished, she was subjugate to a bad, destructive will. How then could the sky be shining? There was no sky, there was no luminous atmosphere of out-of-doors. Only the inside of the school was real—hard, concrete, real and vicious. “

To Lawrence, modern society is the destroyer of souls.

 Ursula goes through several epiphanies, believing that she has broken through into a being not affected by the petty and malevolence of the world, only to find herself being pulled into old habits again. She is constantly attempting to fight the insidious effects of industrialism, institutions and conventions upon herself.

She takes Anton Skrebensky, a lover and eventual fiancé. Lawrence is so very nuanced here. He is no villain, as some writers would have portrayed such a character.  Though somewhat shallow, he is very sympathetic, he is kind, gentle and passionately in love with Ursula. However he is a man of the modern world and a danger to Ursula’s soul. He believes in democracy, patriotism and sacrifice in the name of national causes. He states simply,

"I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation." 

Ursula’s behavior toward her betrothed is horrendous. She is both passionately in love with him, yet feels the need to escape him and what he represents. She vacillates between intense passion and rejection and literally tortures Skrebensky with the hot and cold behavior.

Ursula eventually comes to what seems be enlightenment. She breaks all mental and spiritual ties with the corrupt and pernicious aspects of humanity and society. She completely realizes her natural and animalistic self. Lawrence often describes these tendencies in Anna as dark and associates them with moonlight.  This path to human renewal is a dark one. She becomes what for Lawrence is an ideal human being and there is a suggestion that she will lead the way for others. Both Ursula and her mother, Anna, see this perfect life and path for humanity as being symbolized by a rainbow, hence the title of the book.

Ursula is certainly a superb literary creation. Though I do not agree exactly where Lawrence has gone with her as well as where he has arrived at with his ideology, this novel is a brilliant achievement.

As I alluded to above, I will begin reading the sequel to this book, Women in Love. Though I have heard that it is a superb novel, I almost wish that it did not exist. The Rainbow is such an esthetically satisfying work that it seems complete. Ursula’s final epiphany is so very perfect that I feel that all that needs to be said about her has been said. We shall see what the sequel brings.