III. Dunsinane
Macbeth is at first a just king in Holinshed, who rules well for ten years. Then he starts to fear that "he should be served of the same cup, as he had ministered to his predecessor."[22] Once he eliminates Banquo, he finds that he benefits in two ways from killing off his nobility: they cannot threaten him, and he gets their property. He orders the construction of Dunsinane as an image of central power and a way to dominate his nobles, who must in turn finance and assist in its construction:
Further, to the end he might the more cruellie oppresse his subjects with all tyrantlike wrongs, he builded a strong castell on the top of an hie hill called Dunsinane, situate in Gowrie, ten miles from Perth, on such a proud height, that standing there aloft, a man might behold well neere all the countries of Angus, Fife, Stermond, and Ernedale, as it were lieing underneath him.[23]
In the Holinshed tradition, the castle at Dunsinane—a high hill surveying several counties—offers Macbeth an image of his pride and a place from which to oppress his nobles. The castle is not primarily defensive. When the English forces arrive, Macbeth leaves its walls to face the enemy in the field.
In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, Dunsinane shelters a man who lives in constant fear. Like Inverness, where Macbeth hears noises after he murders Duncan, Dunsinane becomes a projection of Macbeth's psychic state, for Dunsinane represents a riddle of the future. Macbeth hears the name when he seeks two prophetic answers from the "wey-ward" sisters.[24] First, he wants to know if he will be killed. Second, he wants to know if Banquo's issue will reign. After Macbeth is shown three apparitions—the armed head, the bloody child, and the child crowned, with a tree in his hand—he concludes that he "shall live the lease of na-
ture, pay his breath / To time and mortal custom" (Macbeth 4.1.99-100). The question about Banquo's issue is answered by "a show of eight Kings , [the eighth] with a glass in his hand, and Banquo last." Macbeth believes the two answers contradict each other: why, if the witches correctly (as he believes) predict that he will live long will Banquo's issue inherit the throne?
What seems to ensue—if we accept Banquo as the ancestor of King James—is that Macbeth soon dies, while Banquo's issue succeeds. One set of prophecies (the apparitions) is ambiguous, the other (the show of kings) accurate. But why should the witches' spectacle of kings unambiguously foretell the future? They do so because Dunsinane represents that "imagined better state" that R. S. Crane identified as the key to Macbeth's conduct.[25] As an omen of social change, Dunsinane is first mentioned when the weird sisters produce their third apparition, the child crowned. A shift in accent suggests that Macbeth misinterprets what the sovereign child tells him about the length of his own reign. Informing Macbeth that he will rule just as long as Birnan Wood does not move, the apparition gives Dunsinane a penultimate stress ("Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be untíl / Great Bírnan wóod to hígh Dunsínane híll / Shall come against him," Macbeth 4.1.92-94). Macbeth pronounces it another way ("Till Birnan Wood remove to Dunsináne / I cannot taint with fear," Macbeth 5.3.2). Macbeth regards Dunsinane as an image of his own safe future, but the shift in pronunciation reinforces his self-deception.
After Macbeth takes (false) hope from the witches in act four, Dunsinane becomes his sole habitation. We see him nowhere else. He mentions the Birnan Wood prophecy frequently while there, though he says nothing about the succession that tormented him earlier ("For Banquo's issue have I fil'd my mind," Macbeth 3.1.64). He sends others to kill Lady Macduff (he personally murders her in Holinshed). While he remains within, he orders Seyton to scour the countryside and hang those who talk of fear (Macbeth 5.3.36). From a military perspective, there is no reason not to believe him when he proclaims that "our castle's
strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn" (Macbeth 5.5.3-4). Macbeth has "supp'd full with horrors" (Macbeth 5.5.135), but at Dunsinane, he seems to have buried his fear while conducting a reign of terror.
Dunsinane appears to Macbeth as a refuge. He constandy scrutinizes it as a way to control society, ostensibly because it keeps him safe as long as Birnan Wood stays away. Lady Macbeth's death changes his perception. Psychologically, Macbeth removes himself because his caste, haunted by his dead wife, no longer corresponds to his vision of a safe future. Despite the advantage of the castle, Macbeth then arms and meets the English forces in the field.
To understand this shift we need to recognize that Lady Macbeth's death takes place in the same interval of the eternal present that confines Macbeth throughout the play—cut off from the past, unable to reach the safe future. First, Macbeth hears a cry. Before he learns the source of the sound, he recalls a happier time, before blood had dulled his sensibilities, a time when he could feel horror—"The time had been, my senses would have cool'd / to hear a night-shriek" (Macbeth 5.5.10). Seyton then announces Lady's Macbeth's death. His words prompt Macbeth's soliloquy on the empty significance of tomorrow. The announcement of Birnan Wood's movement closes the interval in which Macbeth loses his hold on that "imagined better state" whose heroic pursuit turned his murders into tragic misdeeds. Realizing his future is empty, Macbeth engages in a form of sympathetic magic: he empties his castle to allow its reinscription by others. The gesture reveals the courage that makes Macbeth attractive despite his foul deeds. His departure, with harness on his back, leaves the edifice open to the invading forces.
Emptied by Macbeth, Dunsinane welcomes the English as Macbeth fights in the field. "This way, my lord, the castle's gently rendered," Siward tells Malcolm: "Enter, sir the castle" (Macbeth 5.7.24, 30). Shakespeare's direct sources provide nothing like this moment. But the literary roots of a castle that both symbolizes the law and also shelters foul customs stretch back through chivalric romance. The sea change in
Macbeth's perception of Dunsinane—his self-abandonment of what previously had represented future hope but now seems only a reminder of past sin—depends on the symbolism that made castles a sign of status and future hope.
Macbeth's intuition that he is the keeper of foul customs leads him to face the invading forces, a military decision also found in one of the chivalric romances Shakespeare may well have read, Anthony Munday's 1591 translation of Palmerin d'Oliva:
When the King of Scots understood the coming of the King of England, and that in all haste he would bid him battle [he conferred] with his Captains about their present affairs, concluding to offer the enemy skirmishes, because thereby they would know their intent.
Although the confrontation seems unsettled, the Scottish king suddenly foresees the future, to the amazement of the English:
Notwithstanding he gave order to prepare for battle, because he knew the King of England came for no other purpose. The Englishmen, not suffering the Scots to have leisure to fortify themselves, were by the king the next morning commanded in array, and all wings and squadrons appointed.[26]
Dunsinane, as Macbeth abandons it, represents his recognition of society's need to forget—in the name of futurity—the amount of injustice and repression that goes on in the process of civilization. With Macbeth's demise, banished good returns, evil is purged, savage customs are tamed. Macbeth's foul ways and his castles yield to the new dominion promised by Malcolm: domestic order, civility, proper burial, true succession. At the political level, the northward march of Malcolm, Siward, and their English troops, who join disaffected Scottish lords at Birnan, softens what might otherwise be viewed as imperial conquest. As the play ends, the invaders appear to restore sound but temporarily displaced Scottish traditions, which dovetail with good English manners. Malcolm—the son of Duncan, the virgin warrior and instrument of jus-
tice—renames his "thanes and kinsmen" with the English word "earls" (Macbeth 5.9.28-30). But he maintains the custom of being "crown'd at Scone," a nostalgic but powerful sign, the image of a wild, romantic past when kings were freely chosen in the open air, when justice still walked on earth, and ghosts did not yet dance on castle ruins—an image that Protestant propaganda used to justify attacks on Church of Rome property, as in Lewes Lavatar's gloss on Isaiah 34:
In the ruinous and tottering Pallaces, Castles, and houses, horrible spirits shal appeare with terrible cries, and the Satyro shal call unto hir mate, yea the night hags shal take their rest there. For by the sufferance of God, wicked Devils work strange things in those places where men have exercised pride and cruelty.[27]
By exorcizing such demons from old castles, the social resolution envisioned by Macbeth combines the old and the new, the distant source of ancient and good customs and the present that winnows away foul accretions, to provide a glimpse of a proper future, a more civil society.