II. Forres

Succession—the issue that preys on Macbeth's mind—is a powerful instance of social custom. The rules of Tanistry obtain in Scotland, in Holinshed's account, whereby the title devolves by popular election on the warrior best able to sustain it. A few years after Macbeth , the rule of Tanistry would be outlawed in Ireland—the country whose customs seem to have made England so conscious of her habits and manners.^[18] Macbeth thinks Duncan defrauds him, because

by the old lawes of the realme, the ordinance was, that if he that should succeed were not of able age to take the charge upon himselfe, he that was next of bloud unto him should be admitted.^[19]

The play, by contrast, ignores the Tanistry issue, making it seem that only Macbeth's perverse ambition leads him to believe that he and not Malcolm should be named as successor.

Duncan announces the succession at Forres, where he also conjures an image of a nostalgic time, when traitors were executed and hypocrites, whose faces did not betray them, were exposed. Macbeth professes his loyalty in the kind of intricate language associated with ceremonial customs and the ritual expectations of feudal exchange, although his words hint at his concern for his own posterity: "Your Highness' part / Is to receive our duties; and our duties / Are to your throne and state children and servants" (Macbeth 1.4.23-25). Mimicking the inscrutable features of his predecessor, the Thane of Cawdor, which led Duncan to conclude that "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face," Macbeth seeks to disguise his "deep desires" before Duncan calls Macbeth's valor a "banquet" during the first scene set at Forres (Macbeth 1.4.11-12, 51, 56).

Later in the play, Forres offers itself as a place where Macbeth can harbor himself, his murderous ways, and his brittle deluded hopes (before the witches dash them in act four) of passing his title to a son. At Forres, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seek to establish ceremonial order after the death of Duncan. The banquet scene at the royal palace plays out the conflict between Macbeth's murders and a vision of a future when Macbeth can be free from fear, a vision conjured by the open sky of Scone where Macbeth was crowned, "whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air" (Macbeth 3.4.21-22). As Macbeth welcomes his guests, he makes his banquet the image of former, untroubled times. As in some noncompetitive golden age, the guests each know their "own degrees" (Macbeth 3.4.1). No keeper of the castle is needed to seat them, as if the absence of a castellan indicates the absence of evil custom. Macbeth condescends to mingle, while Lady Macbeth keeps her woman's place of silence apart—"my heart speaks they are welcome" (Macbeth 3.4.7), letting her husband talk formally for her.

The banquet at Fortes uses ceremonies and priorities of seating to give physical shape and civilized expression to underlying debts and obligations and competition. But Macbeth's murderers disrupt this expression of social order, prompting Lady Macbeth to complain that Macbeth's private conversation with them, in drawing him apart, devalues the meal's "ceremony" (Macbeth 3.4.35). In Holinshed's ambiguous account, Macbeth, it may be argued, has Banquo murdered on his way home from dinner at Fortes, "so that he would not have his house slandered."^[20] Shakespeare clearly puts the murder first, so that Banquo's ghost can invade the ceremonial dinner. The entrance of Banquo's ghost thrusts the image of order into the past—the image of what a shaken Macbeth calls "th' olden time, / Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal" (Macbeth 3.4.75).^[21] Lady Macbeth desperately attempts to give the name of normalcy to the disorder that Banquo's ghost stirs in Macbeth—"Think of this, good peers, / But as a thing of custom" (Macbeth 3.4.95-96). It is not obvious to Lady Macbeth—nor would it have been

clear to many English jurists—that disorder cannot be justified and social concord restored under the sign of "custom."