4—
Another Day, "Another Golgotha":
Macbeth and the Tyranny of Nature

And first [Satan's] endeavours have ever been, and they cease not yet to instill a belief in the minde of man, There is no God at all. . . . that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours, and is but a Politicall Chymera. . . . Where he succeeds not thus high, he labours to introduce a secondary and deductive Atheisme; that although, men concede there is a God, yet . . . that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existencies therein: That he looks not below the Moon, but hath designed the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferiour deputations. To promote which apprehensions or empuzzell their due conceptions, he casteth in the notions of fate, destiny, fortune, chance and necessity. . . . Whereby extinguishing in mindes the compensation of vertue and vice, the hope and fear of heaven or hell; they comply in their actions unto the drift of his delusions. . . .
— Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1650)^[1]

If Browne is right, then Macbeth does the devil's work. Admittedly, Shakespeare marks as sinister the creatures who first plant these doubts in the protagonist, puzzling him with paradoxes of fate and necessity until he forgets the significance of virtue and vice. But even the virtuous characters express only a token belief in Christian afterlife, and the idea of a divine presence in nature provides a suspiciously convenient endorsement for the established political hierarchies. Indeed, as in The Spanish Tragedy , monarchical power becomes guiltily associated with the implacable power of time and nature over human aspirations.

Furthermore, Macbeth nurtures what Browne calls "secondary Atheisme" by emphasizing the tragic implications of the generational answer to mortality. As in Measure for Measure , the surface celebration of procreative order fails to dispel an underlying anxiety that this order is adequate only to the subsistence needs of the group, not to the narcissistic needs of the individual: "common natures" survive, to the neglect of "single existencies." For an egoist such as Macbeth, the only meaningful system is one that gives each different animal "Particular addition from the bill / That writes them all alike. And so of men" (3.1.94–100). On this point Macbeth is less discursive than Measure for Measure , but imagistically more compelling. I have argued elsewhere that Macbeth offers a plaintive allegory about the doomed struggle of the aspiring human individual,^[2] and so I will cover the ground quickly here, as an expressionistic coda to my argument about Measure for Measure .

In many ways, Macbeth presents itself as a story of positive moral order with strong Christian markings. The protagonist systematically violates all the cycles of regenerative nature in killing King Duncan, and is then fittingly punished by exclusion from the benefits of those same cycles: night and day, sleeping and waking, autumn and spring, parent and child. Close reading reveals an integrated symbolic system, reflecting the "Chain of Being" in its full extension. Yet the play finally slips free from that moralistic chain, and the overdetermined containment of political rebellion sets the stage for a much wider subversion. While Macbeth certainly echoes standard Elizabethan propaganda that defended the political status quo under the guise of defending the natural order, it makes that order appear smotheringly totalitarian. Hypocritical and even tyrannical abuses of the conventional analogy between natural and political order have been well documented in recent cultural criticism, and Macbeth alerts us to the dangers underlying even the most benevolent version of those orders. Behind the play's overt defense of legitimate royal succession lies a sympathetic parable about the fate of the politi-

cally dispossessed—in fact, about the fate of everyone betrayed by an Elizabethan culture that at once fervently provoked and fervently repressed grand ambitions.

And behind the political parable lies a sympathetic Existential parable about the fate of all human aspirations in a natural world that simultaneously demands and punishes artifice. Pico della Mirandola's "Oration" demonstrates that self-fashioning was not merely a social event in the Renaissance. It was viewed as a fundamental fact of spiritual existence, legible in the fundamental facts of bodily existence: the clothing and shelter human beings need in order to survive. Clothes and castles dominate the imagery of Macbeth , and the paradoxes of free will haunt its philosophy. Latent in the story of providence punishing evil is a disturbing portrayal of the forces of mutability obliterating all assertions of individual life. The flux of nature consumes all efforts to make the world conform to our desires and reflect our consciousness, as Birnam Wood swallows up Dunsinane castle—the central focus of ambition in the play. While Janet Adelman argues forcefully that Malcolm's arboreal stratagem is part of a persistent effort to "obscure the operations of male power, disguising them as a natural force," it could be argued, conversely, that nature appropriates Malcolm's campaign in order to accelerate, and to obscure under the disguise of legitimate male power, its own amoral triumph over the markers of human will.^[3] Becker argues that human beings typically earn and defend a feeling of "cosmic specialness" and "unshakable meaning" by "carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations" (p. 5). In the fall of Macbeth and his castle, many common stratagems of denial collapse as well. Our susceptibility to the elusive promises of the supernatural derives from the recognition that mortality permeates the realm of nature. Freud associated his own superstitiousness with an aspiration toward immortality, and Norman O. Brown asserts that Hegel's category of human labor "is a transformation of the negativity or nothingness of death into the extroverted action of negating or changing nature."^[4] In this sense, Macbeth's struggle to defend his exalted personal status, by magic spells and castle walls, against the orders of natural succession reflects a basic human struggle; Shakespeare costumes the struggle as villainy, but also invites our sympathetic recognition of humanity in the creature doomed to play this scene.

The camouflaged advance of a new generation, led by "Siward's son / And many unrough youths that even now / Protest their first of

manhood" (5.2.9–11), represents springtime in the eternal forest of the world. In Measure for Measure a similar device allowed us to follow all the stages of human reproduction; in Macbeth it threatens to expose the way all generations chase and follow each other into death, which swallows up into its indifference all the aspirations we invest in life, all the physical structures by which we defend life, and all the narrative structures by which we try to imbue it with meaning. The destined enemy of each of our lives hides behind those branches, and creeps at a petty but relentless pace until we run out of tomorrows. When Macbeth boasts that his "castle's strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn" (5.5.2–3), he is not figuring on a millenium of weeds coming up through the cracks in the pavement. But, on one symbolic level, that subtle, gradual, implacable invasion—as much as Malcolm or vengeful cherubs or his own conscience—is what conquers Macbeth. The obsession with time that critics have often noticed in this plays^[5] reflects a central concern with mortality, with the way time inexorably propels us into timelessness.

Macbeth thus partly arises from, and nicely epitomizes, the mortalitycrisis of its surrounding culture, which gazed deep into time and sometimes saw not God but annihilation:

All that the hand of man can uprear, is either overturned by the hand of man, or at length by standing and continuing consumed: as if there were a secret opposition in Fate (the unevitable decree of the Eternal) to control our industry, and countercheck all our devices and proposing. Possessions are not enduring, children lose their names. . . . (Drummond, pp. 47–48)

A suspicion that erasure rather than salvation awaits at the end of time would surely provoke the psyche to construe, the supernatural as a sinister conspiracy—and perhaps as a conspiracy of women as well, of wyrd sisters who make us, but also make us temporary. The three witches begin to look like the three Fates, and (in an essay that bears richly on several of Shakespeare's works) Freud argues that these Morae who shape mortal destiny in humans arose from an increasingly uneasy reading of the Hours who shape seasonal time in nature.^[6] The neat patterns of action and imagery in Macbeth prove only that nature has powerful reflexes, not that it has a sympathetic consciousness. It appears to reward standard morality, but there is no proof that it is operated by any providential wisdom, nor that it makes allowance for any human essence. Mother Nature is an admirably efficient housekeeper, but we crave love from her also, and in Macbeth she ignores our narcissistic desires and smothers us with the imprint of her own identity. This may

be more than a casual analogy. Freud maintains "that the fear of death should be regarded as analogous to the fear of castration and that the situation to which the ego is reacting is one of being abandoned by the protecting superego—the powers of destiny—so that it has no longer any safeguard against all the dangers that surround it."^[7] In Macbeth it is not the paternal superego but its maternal bodily counterparts that perform this betrayal; the protagonist loses not only his generative powers, but also the assurance of continued existence and omnipotence normally conferred by the mother's attentive gaze. Lady Macbeth, always threatening to abandon violently her nurturant role if Macbeth strays from her program, partly represents an unreliable Mother Nature who always gives too little and turns away from us too soon.

The play thus shares psychological roots with countless folk-tales about men led astray by temptresses who promise perfect love. The fundamental narcissism such promises reflect and generate make it hard to accept subordination, whether to a lawful king or to the laws of nature; the oedipal crisis is thus replayed and abreacted in the political and theological arenas.^[8]Macbeth conflates the two forms of subjugation through Duncan's decision to make his throne hereditary; Macbeth's unwillingness to be a subject to Duncan's progeny becomes a synecdoche for his more general unwillingness to be subject to the usual laws of cyclical nature.

It is especially hard to accept these kinds of subjugation at glorious moments of triumph like the one Macbeth enjoys at the start of the play, moments when a voice that seems to come simultaneously from the supernatural and from the unconscious foretells some greater destiny. The speakers are weird sisters partly because they are displaced mothers. That these creatures and Lady Macbeth reflect some sinister distortion of motherhood has become virtually a critical commonplace, and an oedipal reading of that distorted mirroring is hardly less common. But the pattern has implications far beyond the predictable syndromes of sexual desire; it bears on the desire—arguably even more primal, and more frustrating—for lasting personal significance. Adelman perceptively identifies escape from women as a thematic fantasy in Macbeth , but perhaps this is fundamentally a fantasy of escaping the bodily vulnerability and bodily determinism women represent for men (as in Becker's revisionist reading of castration-anxiety). The Bible repeatedly insists that man born of woman is condemned to death; to survive in this scenario, Macduff must be "unnatural" in precisely that category. In the face of mortality, we must be all or we are nothing, and any obstruction

of our majestic will evokes a murderous response.^[9] Like Macbeth himself, we are each constantly losing an all-important battle against nature, losing even while spring and offspring burgeon within and around us—perhaps because of those burgeonings.^[10] The terror of that recognition is constantly threatening to break through the reassuring surface of the play's moral argument. The apparently benevolent powers of natural order finally enforce the same doom that the apparently malevolent weird sisters do. It hardly requires a supernatural seer to predict that nature will briefly exalt and then permanently consume us, but it may take an extraordinary artist to trick us into confronting that possibility.

We are much more willing to believe in our immortality than our mortality; Christianity makes use of that willingness, and so do the witches. The repeated "hail" with which they first greet Macbeth should be counted as the first of the treacherous equivocations that provoke Macbeth to place too optimistic a reading on their promises. Addressed to Banquo, the word echoes the Annunciation (as in Measure for Measure ), promising that his son will rise to glory, and that "of his kingdome shalbe no end" (Luke 1:33, Geneva Bible). Addressed to Macbeth, it may echo instead the fatal betrayal of Jesus by Judas (as in 3 Henry VI and Richard II ).^[11] Since these supernatural agents hail him with "grace" (1.3.55), announce that he is in special favor with the Lord, promise him a kingship, and half-answer his puzzlement about how that could possibly occur, Macbeth can hardly be blamed for misleading his wife into associating the "tidings" of "great news" he brings her with the Biblical "tidings of great joye" (1.5.28, 36; Luke 2:10).^[12]

Surely Macbeth is mistaken to believe the whole of the witches' prophecy merely because part of it comes true, yet that is precisely how Jacobean Christians were supposed to derive their faith in God's eternal providence: "Who can doubt of the performance of all, that sees the greatest part of a Prophesie performed?" (Sermons , VII, 62, translating Augustine). Macbeth lives out a dark shadow of the Christian story, and his via dolorosa proves a dead end. The blood-soaked sergeant of the opening scenes reports that Macbeth and Banquo fought as if they "meant to . . . memorize another Golgotha" (1.2.40). Shakespeare does the same: he reminds us of"the place of dead mens skulles" where even the dearest of God's children are betrayed to death by their mortal bodies, and where all our differentiations melt into our common heritage.^[13] In Richard II , Carlisle warns that, if Bullingbrook is permit-

ted to usurp Richard's throne, "The blood of English shall manure the ground . . . and this land be call'd / The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls" (4.1.137–44). Civil war is surely terrible, but would the ground we walk on now hold the residue of any fewer corpses if Richard had held the crown in peace? Again violence and violation serve as the disguises, and the scapegoats, for the depredations of natural mortality over time—an epidemic cultural reaction-formation analyzed (I have argued earlier) in The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet .

Macduff blames Macbeth's usurpation for the fact that in the "downfall birthdom" of Scotland, "each new morn, / New widows howl, new orphans cry" (4.3.4–5); but is any nation spared these cries? It may be true, as Macduff argues sixty lines later, that "Boundless intemperance / In nature is a tyranny," but the normative temporal bounds imposed by nature function like a tyranny as well, ruthlessly subjugating the primal will to immortality. As Montaigne reports, "To the men who told Socrates, 'The thirty tyrants have condemned you to death,' he replied, 'And nature, them."'^[14] If truth is indeed the daughter of time, then human life is an abortive birth, as so many are in this play's imagery. "One Church-yard in Paris ," observed a 1630 Scottish tract, "hath moe sculls, then there are living heads in Scotland ."^[15] In truth—that is, in time—Macbeth's country is "another Golgotha," a heap of skulls. So was Shakespeare's London, and so are our own cities, for all our desperate denials:

                                 Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile.
(4.3.166–69)

The time-lapse photography that promises renewal in the form of Birnam Wood and Malcolm's young cohort also threatens to reveal the world as a graveyard; like Renaissance respice te finem practices, it threatens to make us know ourselves as merely skulls. Donne insists that "all the ground is made of the bodies of Christians," and we each confront the bitter fatedness that Donne condoles in Christ, who "found a Golgotha (where he was crucified) even in Bethlem, where he was born" (Sermons , VI, 362, VII, 279).

Macbeth is a memento mori as well as a bloody melodrama, because it presents "strange images of death" less gory, but finally no less disturbing, than the play's actual killings (1.3.95). For Macbeth himself,

bloodshed soon becomes merely tedious; what remains truly horrible is lifelessness, and that can be found almost anywhere once the bonds of denial have been broken. "Absence" becomes his synonym for "death" (3.1.135), and the principal terror of this terrifying play becomes less the process of dying than the stasis of death itself. When "the common enemy of man" (3.1.70)—whether that is Satan or death—takes away his wife, and with her his last hope for a procreative future, Macbeth's response is memorable mostly for its colorlessness. It is saturated, not with blood, as is the visual aspect of the play, nor with hell-fire, as most Christian-moralist readings would predict, but with the mortality-crisis that is the play's most compelling philosophical motive.

What is especially horrible about Macbeth's disillusioned soliloquy is that it makes life very much what death would be in a universe without salvation or damnation. As a sermon later in the century would warn, "if Christ had not risen , Death had been ameer Destruction , and not a Sleep : A perpetual Banishment from the Territories of Nature ."^[16] Surely that kind of banishment—from sleep, from procreation, from all the regenerative cycles of nature—is what steadily destroys these villains. Macbeth's speech describes a condition that is vivid and terrifying in its very blankness and banality: benighted days creep by one after another till the end of time, as we turn to dust, never hearing or speaking, returning at last to nothingness. Macbeth's complaints about his hollow life as king of Scotland comport a more expansive warning about our empty afterlives as subjects of nature:

                          She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
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,
Life's 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.
(5.5.16–27)

Macbeth sounds remarkably like the antagonist in John Dove's A Confutation of Atheism —published the year before Macbeth probably appeared—who blows out a candle and announces scoffingly, "your

soule is no more than the flame of that candle."^[17] To a materialist, time and mortality expose the meaninglessness of life.

It may be possible to salvage the appearance of a conventional Christian moral by arguing that Macbeth experiences human existence as a series of walking shadows and insignificant tomorrows only because his peculiar sinfulness has drained his own life of meaning.^[18] But no alternative view of life is asserted nearly so compellingly. Instead, Shakespeare shows us a wide variety of poor players whose strutting and fretting gives way to rehearsals for death—again, not for the act of dying, but for the non-act of being dead. Sleep and blindness are the main stage-business in this rehearsal, and together they adumbrate annihilation. Lady Macbeth's vow to kill Duncan takes the form of a vow that light will never see the dawn of his safe departure (1.5.59–60). When the sun refuses to rise the next day, as Ross reports (2.4.5–10), the living world is given a frightening moment of empathy with the man who died yesterday, with all the dead who have not awakened, who see merely darkness. Only in this radically negative way is the physical universe responsive to human events; only by abandoning us when we misbehave does Mother Nature give a hint of the character and concern we are so eager to register.

It is remarkable how frequently, and how uneasily, the commonplace consolatory comparison between sleep and death appears in the haunted nights of Macbeth . As in the cluster of references in 2.2, the comparison becomes another way of asking whether death is part of a redemptive cycle, or merely one last loss of consciousness. The voice in the murder chamber makes Macbeth think of sleep as "the death of each day's life" (2.2.41). Lady Macbeth compares the sleep of Duncan's drugged grooms to death, and tells her husband that "the sleeping, and the dead, / Are but as pictures" (2.2.56–57). She then smears the grooms with blood in their sleep, and has Macbeth kill them before they can fully awaken. Macduff urges Duncan's loyalists, "Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, / And look on death itself . . . As from your graves rise up" (2.3.70–73). What distinguishes death from sleep, it seems, is that awakening from death is impossible. Perhaps the horror of this recognition combines with the obvious regrets in Macbeth's response to the knocking at the gate: "Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst" (2.2.77). Later Macbeth complains,

                         Duncan is in his grave.
After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well;

Treason has done his worst: nor steel nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.
(3.2.22–26)

Not even a judging God, it seems; nothing will come of nothingness. When "a hideous trumpet calls to parley / The sleepers of the house" (2.3.75–76), Duncan fails to resurrect, despite extensive hints that his death should be associated with the crucifixion.^[19] Macbeth may imagine, with Hamlet, that dreams could infiltrate this sleep of death, but his remark as he approaches Duncan's bedchamber—"wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep" (2.1.50–51)—suggests merely another projective effort to moralize his own actions.

As in Hamlet , ghosts are also such guilty projections; they show us a path into the future, but at the end of that path lurk our darkest suspicions about life after death. Confronted by the ghost of Banquo, Macbeth talks about graves spitting out their half-digested food, like birds of prey (3.4.70–72). This is not a nice view of the general resurrection, because—like the vision of regicidal times conjured by Horatio in the first scene of Hamlet —it is not resurrection in any Christian sense, but a brutal parody. At Golgotha, the skulls are empty: "The time has been / That when the brains were out, the man would die, /And there an end" (3.4.78–80). The specter forces Macbeth, and us, to attribute to a dead body the full emptiness of its experience; we confront a demonic inversion of the promised afterlife: form without content, animation without anima. To be unseeing, and to be unseen, are alike tokens of death; the dead beckon us from beyond with their terrible passivity. "Thou hast no speculation in those eyes / Which thou dost glare with," Macbeth tells Banquo's ghost; "This is more strange than such a murder is" (3.4.82–83, 95–96). To be stared at by those blind eyes forces Macbeth to confront not only his peculiar guilt, but also his typical mortality, and nothing could be stranger than that. Throughout the play there is a terror of that oblivion, of the extinguished consciousness that has eyes but cannot see.

Lady Macbeth's petty pacing from night to night traps her in a timeless series of yesterdays. Though "her eyes are open . . . their sense is shut" (5.1.21–22); this zombie-like sleepwalking mirrors Banquo's nightmarish deathwalking. She insists that "Banquo's buried; he cannot come out on's grave" (5.1.53–54), but at that very moment she is living proof that the dead still walk, with their terrifyingly sightless eyes. These

"strange images of death" culminate in Macbeth's head on a pole: a head that has been seeing and saying things for us all through the play now stares down at us blankly, unchangingly. This is death, and, all too clearly, it is not sleep.

More explicit and conventional comments about afterlife in the play ring remarkably hollow, as if the prospect of eternal reward or punishment were a token gesture toward stabilizing the definitions of earthly goods and evils. Macduff, for example, frantically summons his comrades to look at Duncan's murdered body and "see / The great doom's image": the Last Judgment (2.3.71–72). But this hyperbolic expression of his horror—like the similar one at the end of King Lear —may evoke in the audience a different kind of horror: what if the great doom's true image is merely a motionless corpse? Later Ross equivocates uncomfortably on the idea that Macduff's murdered family are "well at peace." When Macduff learns the truth, his diction strongly associates death with negation: "Naught that I am, / Not for their own demerits but for mine, / Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now" (4.3.228–30). Their souls have apparently been slaughtered with their bodies, after being judged by the earthly king rather than any divine one. All heaven can offer is rest—and the rest is silence. Macduff says later that if Macbeth is "slain, and with no stroke of mine, / My wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still" (5.7.16–17). He no longer seems to suppose them in heaven; if they survive at all, they survive as a vengeful residue in his conscience, one that can be exorcised only through the symbolic transactions of revenge-tragedy.

Banquo speaks about "heaven's breath" only as a metaphor for the pleasant air in regenerative places on earth; and the troubled "heavens" Ross refers to during the dark morning after Duncan's murder belong to astronomy, not theology. The Porter jokes about being "porter of hellgate," but concludes that "this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter it no further" (2.3.1–13). The world is an ordinary physical place that resists the grand morality-dramas we sometimes project onto it. This Porter does admit people to a sort of hell, but it is only Macbeth's castle, where the torments of conscience and a seemingly predestined earthly doom take the place of any actual devil.

Macbeth hears the bell as "a knell / That summons [Duncan] to heaven or to hell" (2.1.63–64); but Duncan apparently sleeps quietly.^[20] The Porter then promptly parodies the idea of answering that kind of eschatological summons. When Macbeth considers "the deep damna-

tion" of murdering Duncan in 1.7, he is worried about "Heaven's cherubins" testifying to the mortal world. What concerns him is that "we still have judgment here," not any Day of Judgment hereafter. He mentions "the life to come" only as something he would gladly forfeit if he could count on reigning unopposed for a few decades. He worries that Duncan's "virtues will plead like angels" against the usurpation, not that angels themselves might punish the sin; religion retreats to the level of simile, and damnation to the level of political inconvenience. Indeed, Macbeth sounds something like the Renaissance annihilationists whose radical Protestantism coalesccd with radical politics—"a companye aboute this towne that saye, that hell is noe other but povertie & penurye in this worlde; and heaven is noe other but to be ritch, and enjoye pleasures; and that we dye like beastes, and when we argonne there is noe remembrance of us. . . ."^[21] All that remains is animal competition for material and evolutionary advantage.

The witches know "all mortal consequence," and that seems to be enough for Macbeth, who seems comforted to learn that he

Shall live the lease of Nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom. Yet my heart
Throbs to know one thing. Tell me, if your art
Can tell so much, shall Banquo's issue ever
Reign in this kingdom?
(4.1.98–102)

Surely this question about earthly political succession, though prominent in the plot of the play, is a let-down after the supernatural build-up. In Macbeth as in Prospero, the extraordinary obsession with controlling future generations looks like a desperate compensation for mortality, the deferral of an unanswerable question about human purpose. And if we seize too eagerly on this dynastic mode of consolation—as the play encourages us to do by offering Malcolm's and Fleance's eventual success in compensation for Duncan's and Banquo's unjust and premature deaths—then we find ourselves implicated in Macbeth's futile struggle to give his life meaning and justification. Macbeth's bloody campaign to control the Scottish succession thus appears as the tragic playing-out of a fundamental comic formula, the logical (if pathological) extension of a common tendency to submerge fears of personal mortality in fantasies of progeny.

Macbeth insists that if he can win the battle against Malcolm's forces, it will "cheer me ever"; he gives no thought to a time beyond his earthly

reign. All that troubles him, as he had predicted, is a hollowing of his mortal life, not any harrowing thereafter:

I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.
(5.3.22–26)

The only palliative to the demise awaiting all natural entities is a cultural construct, the company misery loves, not any prospect of perpetual bliss. Macbeth does complain that he has given his "etcrnal jewel . . . to the common enemy of man" (3.1.69–70); but since that metaphor for the soul is (if conventional) so materialistic, and since it appears only as the fourth item in Macbeth's second listing of the good things he surrenders by murdering Duncan, it can hardly claim a prominent place in his concerns. Faustus seems quite otherworldly by comparison.

We last see Macbeth, not as a tormented soul, but as an indifferent head. He is not dragged down into any literal hell-mouth at his death, like Faustus; his damnation is his isolation from things human and divine during the brief remainder of his earthly existence.^[22] That punishment may represent a rough translation of the Augustinian commonplace that hell is alienation from God, but it also contributes to the impression that there may be neither a hell nor a heaven waiting for Macbeth, that Everyman is being rewritten as Waiting for Godot . The same isolation reinforces the idea that Macbeth's crime and punishment alike are bound up with his individuality—the individuality that he fights so fiercely to affirm because it is so transient, that (like the dagger) becomes more transient the harder he tries to grasp it, and that leads him only toward death.

Macbeth's final visible punishment fits the crime—a quest for unnatural distinction and elevation—but his extraordinary fate may also be a dramatically heightened version of the fate awaiting many aspiring minds of the Renaissance. Like them, Macbeth is given a compelling belief in the transcendent potential of his interior self, a belief that becomes a torment when that self is doomed to eradication, and can never be made "perfect; / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock"—except perhaps in the form of tomb statuary (3.4.21–22). As long as the future belongs to someone else, Macbeth remains "cabined, cribbed, confined"; the real self is the one miserably trapped inside that tomb,

where a constriction in space replaces the mortal constriction in time (3.4.24). The human awareness of mortality—as Freud argues—can make the evolving beauties of nature into an agonizing spectacle.^[23] Preachers may have promised that "our Bodies, lying in the Grave, do not perish , but lye Dormant , like Trees in Winter ; and like Trees do take root too";^[24] but Birnam Wood advances to eradicate Macbeth, not to renew him. He is only a "yellow leaf" and, finally, a lifeless head on a lifeless stick. With his defeat, "The time is free" (5.9.22), but only because humanity—its doomed slave revolt at an end—has again agreed to accept time as its master.

In Bellini's "Assassination of St. Peter Martyr" (1507) the army hewing down the forest commits the martyrdom with the same weapons. To the extent that he embodies the human will to survive, and enacts all the rebellious violations it compels us half-inadvertently to commit, Macbeth dies for our sins, and we can read in his demise what Dostoyevsky perceived in Holbein's 1521–22 depiction of the dead Christ:

Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or . . . as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up—impassively and unfeelingly—a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and its laws. . . . The picture seems to give the impression of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously.^[25]

So the image of Macbeth's bloody remains mocked on a pole may suggest a failed version of the Crucifixion and Resurrection that were supposed to cure human mortality forever. "Behold the King of the Jews" becomes "Behold where stands / Th'usurper's cursèd head" (5.9.21–22); Macbeth is hoisted on a stick of wood to be jeered at, with the inscription "'Here may you see the tyrant'" (5.8.27). Behind both monstrous inscriptions lies Ecce Homo : "Behold man," with all the potential ironies of that phrase brought to the foreground.

Another, more successful story of crucifixion and resurrection emerges in the play, as Malcolm redeems his father's people from the "Devilish Macbeth" (4.3.117). When Malcolm adds that "our country sinks beneath the yoke; / It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds," and promises that he therefore, as the son and heir, "shall tread upon the tyrant's head" (4.3.39–41), the Christian resonances become overwhelming. This may help to explain Malcolm's hyperbolic self-accusations that have so troubled readers of this scene:

Shakespeare again portrays the mechanisms of Christian redemption in a painfully earth-bound version, allowing a lord to absorb all the sins of his people, but not to cancel them, only to pass them on to a successor at the moment of death. At the start of the scene Malcolm suggests that Macduff surrender him to Macbeth, since it would be "wisdom / To offer up a weak, poor, innocent lamb / T'appease an angry god" (4.3.15–17). But later in the scene Malcolm warns that, if allowed to inherit the kingdom, he will embody

All the particulars of vice so grafted
That when they shall be opened, black Macbeth
Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state
Esteem him as a lamb, being compared
With my confineless harms.
(4.3.51–55)

This atonement oddly replicates the way Macbeth "meant to bathe in reeking wounds" at his new Golgotha (1.2.39–40), and then assumed the regicidal sins of the previous Thane of Cawdor, allowing that rebel to die in a condition of remarkable grace (1.4.1–11). Redemption is trapped in a cycle that functions very much like Original Sin, a fatal burden passed to each new generation.

The idea of a supernatural soul offered by Christianity may function like the portents conjured by the weird sisters. The world that tempts us with dreams of the transmundane finally betrays us back to the facts of physical nature: bloody newborns, young men carrying branches, and the lifeless heads of an older generation that drop away like yellowed leaves. Like Hieronimo and Hamlet, we may join Malcolm in hoping to "make us med'cines of our great revenge / To cure this deadly grief" (4.3.216–17).^[26] We may alternatively join the "crew of wretched souls" who wait patiently for the touch of a royal idol to cure the fleshly decay that is simply "call'd the evil" (4.3.141,147). But (as Marlowe's Faustus complains in his opening soliloquy) there is no evidence that any sort of medicine actually cures mortality, and in our doubting hearts we may share Macbeth's scorn for such temporary symptomatic cures:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR : Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

MACBETH : Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it.
Come, put mine armor on; give me my staff.
(5.3.41–49)

Though the ostensible topic is the guilt of murder, Shakespeare takes advantage of Macbeth's necessary vagueness about what is troubling his wife to make a statement applicable to the psychological burdens of mortality itself.

What is left for Macbeth but to identify with the oppressor? When mortality hits close to home, Macbeth—like many tyrants, including Marlowe's Tamburlaine—responds by usurping death's power, by killing relentlessly as a way of reclaiming volitional control over death. When he declares, "Rebellious dead, rise never fill the wood / Of Birnam rise" (4.1.96–97), Macbeth sounds like a deity who is frightened of staging the Last Judgment, lest the countless resurrected bodies stage a tyrannicide to avenge their measureless sufferings. This identification would have pleased the audience: as in figures from the traditional Grim Reaper to the mass-murderers of modern American movies and headlines, the indiscriminate killer becomes a figure of death itself—for all its horror, a consolingly localized and humanized one, embedded in narrative and susceptible to punishment.

Shakespeare's Duke of Vienna would have been pleased, too, if he read the news from Shakespeare's Scotland: having resigned in protest from the generational future, Macbeth discovers how resilient an organization it can be. Though Banquo has "twenty trenched gashes on his head, / The least a death to nature" (3.4.27–28), his scion survives and takes up the resistance. The power of those bonds of life does not, however, preclude the suspicion that the "great bond / Which keeps [us] pale" (3.2.49–50) also keeps us blind; perhaps only by doing it violence instead of homage can we achieve a final disillusionment. Macbeth's eyes are seldom watching God; except for that fleeting vision of heaven's cherubs, he lets nothing distract him from his fixation on human children and the war against the future that fixation reflects. Even that cautionary vision of heavenly horror may represent a deliberate inflation of his violation, so it will seem adequate to break him free from the ordinary bonds of mortality;^[27] like a Raskolnikov, he wants nothing to "take the present horror from the time" (2.1.59), for fear of

resubmitting himself to a future horror that is all the worse for its banality. The paranoid position—"God and nature are (now) out to get me"—is often merely the dark shadow of narcissism, a way of retaining grandiose self-importance in a universe that has proven uncooperative. Perhaps the spiritual masochism of Calvinist theology reflects the same kind of desperation.

For all its providential overtones, Macbeth subliminally evokes a universe without ultimate meaning. A play full of morals becomes swallowed up by the demoralizing vision of death, and the guilt of blood gradually washes away into the blackness or blankness of mortality. Those who have behaved better than Macbeth, and retain the honor and the troops of friends that he imagines might console old age, do not seem to escape into some preferable eternity. They may have a greater probability of passing life on to a new generation, but the notion that procreation somehow mitigates individual death is particularly problematic in the linear and inward-looking world of tragedy. Here, the blood of Duncan and his sound sleep, the gory Banquo and his haunting return, have a vividness, and a blankness, hardly altered by the political prospects of their sons.

Admittedly, Macbeth makes a very poor endorsement for atheistic morality—indeed, he seems designed to confirm some of the warnings discussed in my Introduction. His soliloquies do, however, prove that in Jacobean England it was already possible for one man to perceive an evolutionist earth, red in tooth and claw; and his actions suggest why it may have seemed imperative for most people to suppress that perception. To the extent that Macbeth's vivid perspective overwhelms the pallor of the moralists around him, Shakespeare seems to have been of the atheists' party, even if he did not partake of the entire ghostless banquet. And to the extent that those moralistic characters seem perfunctory in their religious references, the play demonstrates that an entire society could profess religious values it did not hold very deeply. As Claudius discovers in the prayer scene of Hamlet, pious words may briefly outlive pious convictions, but they cannot climb to any real heaven. All they can do is keep us momentarily clear of a psychological hell.

The fierce conjunction of sexuality and violence in Macbeth 's verbal texture suggests a proto-Darwinian perspective on the fundamental struggles of life. The emphasis on generation in the play anticipates the recognition of evolutionary biology—a recognition with parallels in traditional Christian moralizations of the Fall—that death is part of the

same invention as sexuality. Aside from gradually inventing what we call consciousness, sexual reproduction invented individuality, the unique genetic heritage that a creature will strive to protect and extend. This is of course a very long reach from Shakespeare, but to the extent that there is an evolutionary parable available in Macbeth (and I think there is, with the protagonist as the original bad patriarch of early Freudian myth), it recites a tragedy dictated by our chromosomes. Distantly audible in the story of Macbeth is the endless cry of fear and pain that this system of individuality and mortality, with its endless violent competition, has evoked from our world.

The thematic heroes of the play—renewed life and renewed order—have feet of clay, and velvet fists. As Schopenhauer suggests, "to desire that individuality should be immortal-really means to wish to perpetuate an error infinitely . . . something which it is the real end of life to bring us back from," but "this will not satisfy the claims which are wont to be made upon proofs of our continued existence after death, nor insure the consolation which is expected from such proofs" by human individuals.^[28] This egoistic error is the sin that dooms Macbeth—and the rest of us—to the fear of death. Nor is it entirely anachronistic to perceive such concerns in Jacobean literature, because Macbeth also resembles the diabolically misguided man portrayed by the great mystic Jacob Bochme, a contemporary of Shakespeare whose writings inspired the Quakers on the radical wing of the Reformation.

Boehme records the tragedy of individual selfhood—of the man who "wanted to be his own Lord" but found that the "ego-centric will cannot inherit divine childhood"^[29] —with less romantic sympathy than Shakespeare does. As soon as this typical diseased human creature "considers itself greater than it is . . . the fawning Devil comes to him," making him "intoxicated with his own selfhood," diabolically misguided into a greedy misreading of the universe as a prophecy of his own sovereignty.^[30] After a brief career of strutting and fretting, the individual life discovers that this grand temptation was a treacherous illusion, and its brief candle is extinguished:

since it does not immediately feel its punishment, it thinks that it is no longer a serious matter, not knowing that the more it fashions itself into foolishness the greater a source of eternal pain it receives within itself, so that, when the light of external nature—in which for a time it had strutted its I-ness—breaks up within it, then it stands within its own eternal darkness and pain, so that its false, ego-centric desire is a vain, stinging, hard incisiveness and counter-will.

During this time it hopes for external aid, leading itself into lasciviousness of will, considering this its heavenly kingdom. But when the external light is put out in death, then it remains in eternal remorse, seeing no redeemer within or about it.^[31]

The only escape from this tragic pattern, according to Boehme, is a mystical self-effacement that seems designed less to escape the sins of pride in a conventional Christian sense than to escape the agonies of competition necessarily involved in defending individual identity against a world of mutability. When Macbeth tears to pieces his great bond with the human and natural orders, he behaves like Boehme's misguided soul:

the Devil persuaded it that it might be useful and good to break off the emanation of the senses from [the divine harmony of being] and bring itself into its own image, according to the characteristics of manifoldness, to probe dissimilarity, i.e., to apprehend and experience evil and good.

Thus . . . it brought itself into ego-centric desire, impressing and fashioning itself into selfhood.

Immediately when the knowledge of the life of individualities became manifest, then nature held life caught in dissimilarity, and established her rule. This is why life became painful . . . striving against the unity, against the eternal rest and the one good.^[32]

This amounts to a mystical prophecy of evolution, and Boehme's vision seems to anticipate not only Macbeth's restless suffering, but also the godless existence described by Hobbes. Boehme's archetypal individual "by its own desire made itself dark, painful, gruff, hard and rough. It became sheer restlessness, and it now lives in earthly power in an earthly ground . . . ruling the mortal energy of stars and elements like a special god of nature. By such dominion it has become foolish and crazy. . . ."^[33] Boehme's heaven therefore has less to do with triumphant aerial cherubim than with a Nirvana-like surrender to undifferentiated being, which the egoistic modern psyche is bound to resist.

Much in the play's equivocal universe therefore depends on whether we are on Malcolm's side (and Boehme's), seeing the advancing Birnam Wood as nature serving a benevolent intelligence, or on Macbeth's, seeing in that wood a crushing reminder of the betrayal of human aspiration by an inscrutable creation. The new generations of vegetation and humanity that rise up against Macbeth are killers as well as saviors. The first two acts of the play feverishly insinuate that murder is sex,

especially procreative sex;^[34] the subsequent action implies conversely that sex, especially procreative sex, is murder. The cycle of life is harsh for those who have to die. Though we may seek in that cycle the consolation of generational immortality, the play repeatedly reminds us that the next generation is no less mortal. When parents are forced to confront that fact, they may collapse in despair (as Macduff does), or transfer their denial into a fiery vengefulness (as Malcolm recommends).

Or they may hide behind an icy stoicism, as does Old Siward—"a better soldier none / That Christendom gives out" (4.3.193–94)—when he must sacrifice his son to redeem Scotland from its diabolical tyrant. In a peculiar exchange, Ross says that the loss of this son "must not be measured by his worth, for then / It hath no end" (5.9.11–12). But what end would it have, we may wonder, if it were measured by time instead? Siward insists that, since his son died honorably,

                            God's soldier be he;
Had I as many sons as I have hairs,
I would not wish them to a fairer death.
And so his knell is knolled.

MALCOLM:                      He's worth more sorrow,
And that I'll spend for him.

SIWARD :                          He's worth no more;
They say he parted well and paid his score,
And so God be with him. Here comes newer comfort.
(5.9.14–20)

The stage direction then reads, "Enter MACDUFF, with Macbeth's head ." All one can do is harden one's heart, apply the decorations of social art to the facts of physical nature, pass things unquestioningly on to God, and look around quickly for distractions and compensations, even when the "comfort" proves to be merely another dead man's head. As earlier in the play (e.g., 1.2.27 and 3.2.39), the meaning of "comfort" is the death of an enemy.

One may die with honor; one may die with children; one may die with a task of revenge complete. But in the absence of absolute faith—and it seems to me stubbornly absent from this play—is there really any consolation for death, any honest way not to cower in the face of nature, in the long shadow of eternity? The prospect of a conscious afterlife is yet another topic on which this endlessly equivocal play equivocates, keeping the word of promise to our ear, and breaking it to our hope. Macbeth

performs subliminally some of the same dangerous cultural work that King Lear performs explicitly, exploring and exposing the human need to believe in a providence behind the overwhelming processes of the physical universe, the womb and tomb called nature. If we care about consciousness and the idea of the self, then we are bound to have some reservations about celebrating the triumph of natural order represented in Macbeth . If "There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here" (5.5.47), then all that remains is a brief meaningless struggle against a doom seeded in our birth.

I hold this truth to be self-evident. Though often eclipsed by denial, it remains visible in stories of grim human destiny, from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and the Book of Job in about the fifth century B.C . to the absurdist and Existentialist texts of the twentieth century A.D .—in other words, through all the recorded syllables of Western culture. Clearly the legacy of the Oedipus story in Macbeth goes beyond any psychosexual syndromes attributable to the protagonist. On a broader philosophical level, the role of prophecy in both stories reminds us of the many ways we find our way only to our doom, a doom latent in us from the moment of our creation, for all our proud denials and clever evasions. At the core of that story is a riddle about the creature who goes on four legs, then two, then three. Human beings resist recognizing themselves as the answer to that riddle, as Oedipus resists recognizing himself as the cause of the Theban plague, but we are biologically fated to rise from our infancy to full stature, and then shrivel into decay. Job confronts a similar conundrum: "What is man, that thou doest magnifie him?" (7:17), he asks, and finds his answer in a recognition that these sinful creatures "are exalted for a little, but thei are gone, and are broght lowe as all others: thei are destroyed, and cut as the top of an eare of corne" (24:24). A comparably bleak catechism lies near the heart of Macbeth , as the witches' riddling prophecies shrivel into the dark facts of natural reality. If the profound anxieties represented by these riddles about human nature—and the reflexive denial that disastrously delays the answering of the riddles—are not quite universal, they are at least remarkably transhistorical.

The allusions to Job in Macbeth run wide and deep, reinforcing the play's annihilationist undertones with their persistent imagery of extinguished candles, fleeting shadows, seasonal cycles, and the enslavement of humankind to a mortal destiny at once inscrutable and only too obvious.^[35] "Beware Macduff" is as much as to say, "beware mortality":

Man that is borne of woman, is of short continuance, and ful of trouble. He shooteth forthe as a flowre, and is cut downe: he vanisheth also as a shadow, & continueth not. . . . For there is hope of a tre, if it be cut downe, that it wil yet sproute, and the branches therof wil not cease. . . . But man is sicke, and dyeth, & man perisheth, and where is he? (Job, 14:1–10)

When Bildad then insists that the wicked man shall be uprooted, plunged into darkness, and left without progeny (18:14–19), Job's reply sounds like a plaintive epilogue spoken by the ghost of Macbeth. Conceding his own failings, Job nonetheless protests that God

hath spoiled me of mine honour, & taken the crowne away from mine head. He hath destroied me on everie side & I am gone: & he hath removed mine hope like a tre. And he hath kindled his wrath against me, and counteth me as one of his enemies.

His armies came together, and made their way upon me, & camped about mine tabernacle. (19:8–12)

Deserted by his familiars as well as his family, Job now foresees nothing but a death tainted by supernatural betrayal. Like Macbeth, he is a representative man, capable of reminding us that our fundamental sinfulness does not necessarily make our mortal sufferings into a narrative of divine justice. The start of this chapter suggested that Macbeth performs the devil's work, as Thomas Browne defines it. To the extent that Macbeth provokes some guilty identification with its protagonist, the play puts us on the side of Job's complaints, and therefore, once again, on the side of the Satanic argument against God.

Among contemporary artworks, Akira Kurosawa's superb film adaptation of Macbeth provides the most compelling reading of the play as this sort of parable. Throne of Blood (1957) is framed, start and finish, with long shots of a barren plateau where wind and dust have erased everything but a memorial tombstone, accompanied by a chorus of Solomonic pessimism: "Behold, within this now desolated place, / There once stood a mighty fortress, / There once lived a proud warrior."^[36] That Macbeth-figure encounters his prophetic witch while trapped in the "natural labyrinth" of the forest. She is a corpse-like figure bathed in white light, crouching in a loose bamboo hut, blankly spinning a wheel, and singing:

All men are mortal, all men are vain,
And pride dies first within the grave;
For hair and nails are growing still,

When face and fame are gone.
Nothing in this world will save
Or measure up men's actions here;
Nor in the next, for there is none.
This life must end in fear.
Only evil may maintain
An after-life [for] those who will,
Who love this world, who have no son,
To whom ambition calls.
Even so, this false fame falls;
Death will reign, man dies in vain.

At these words the Macbeth and Banquo figures furiously rush the hut and demand answers—as if they had not already heard a sufficient prophecy. Incredulous at human folly, the spirit provides essentially the same information Shakespeare's witches provide, then disappears on the wind. The warriors charge through the hut in pursuit, but when they turn back, instead of the hut they see mounds of human skulls and bones molded randomly together with mud. Embedded in these mounds are helmets and weapons that look like they might belong to medieval samurai, but might also belong to the armies of Hirohito. Again, from the perspective of deep time, the forest of the world is a place of skulls. At first glance one might suppose that human violence has caused these human ruins; but perhaps it is the other way around. Throne of Blood may seem to be a simple anti-war parable, a reverberation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is also the kind of complex anti-war parable I have been tracing throughout Renaissance drama: a warning that our vain struggle to deny the fatedness and the anonymity represented by these heaps of human remains constantly provokes us toward the pointless murders we call revenge and war and sacrifice. This place of skulls may be called Golgotha, if we want to put the blame on fundamental human wickedness and the demands of divine justice, but all the world's a grave, and what it finally signifies is ours to decide.