‘By The Time Macbeth Murders Duncan He Has Already Lost The Battle For His Soul’
'By The Time Macbeth Murders Duncan
He Has Already Lost The Battle For His Soul'
Essay
Introduction
'By the time Macbeth murders Duncan he has already lost the battle for his soul'. In this essay I am going to discuss this statement and examine the factors that lead to his decision to kill the king. I shall divide the essay into 3 main parts, these are;
. The battle for his soul
2. The factors which lead Macbeth to kill the king
3. Conclusion
The Battle For His Soul
This play was written for James 1 in 1606. Shakespeare's children were now deceased and this had put him into a mood where he would only write tragic plays instead of the usual comedies. Shakespeare included the theme of witches for James 1 as he was into witchcraft and had even wrote a book about it. The target audience of Macbeth would have been a very superstitious Christian crowd. The King was believed to have been put on the throne by God, and to kill the King would be a great sin. The belief in the existence and power of witches was widely believed in Shakespeare's day. The practice of witchcraft was seen to subvert the established order of religion and society, trying to corrupt people and making them sin against God. Witch hunting was a respectable, moral, and highly intellectual pursuit through much of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. If someone lost their soul, they would be lost to God and would be condemned to hell for eternity.
Here is a definition of a soul taken from the oxford dictionary;
. A person's soul is the spiritual part of them that is supposed to continue after their body is dead.
2. Somebody's mind, character, thoughts or feelings.
From the beginning of the play, Macbeth undergoes a complete change in character - from a virtuous nobleman into a monster. He has a tragic weakness - ambition - which, when released, draws him into a web of evil and corruption that finally leaves him with none of the noble human qualities he possessed at the beginning of the play.
Before being transformed into a murderous monster, Macbeth is a popular noble and also a good friend with the King. This is shown when Duncan calls him his 'worthiest cousin'. He shows great loyalty and devotion to both King Duncan and his country in his fight against the Thane of Cawdor. Duncan is grateful for this. He says;
'I have begun to plant thee and will labour / To make thee full of growing.'
He also fights with great courage, which he draws from knowing that he serves a good and virtuous King. This is proved when he says;
'Duncan / Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels.'
He is modest when confronted with his achievements, in contrast to the arrogance that he displays after becoming king. He loves Lady Macbeth, an emotion he will eventually lose by the end of the play. Most of all, he fears what his greed and ambition can lead him to become, and he feels dubious about acting on them. When he kills the King he does it in cold blood, which shows his change after the incident with the witches.
Macbeth doesn't want to kill the King but is convinced by Lady Macbeth that only good things will come from it. But just after he does kill the King, guilt overcomes him and he is left regretting the whole idea. This shows that he still wants God's blessing. Also he says;
'But wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'? / I had most need of the blessing and 'Amen' / Stuck in my throat.'
At that time it was believed that if you could not say 'Amen', God would not bless you and you were doomed ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
Macbeth doesn't want to kill the King but is convinced by Lady Macbeth that only good things will come from it. But just after he does kill the King, guilt overcomes him and he is left regretting the whole idea. This shows that he still wants God's blessing. Also he says;
'But wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'? / I had most need of the blessing and 'Amen' / Stuck in my throat.'
At that time it was believed that if you could not say 'Amen', God would not bless you and you were doomed to eternal damnation. Ultimately he regrets killing the King. Here are some quotes that help to solidify this;
'I had most need of blessing'
'I am afraid to think what I have done'
'To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself'
'Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst'
You should be thinking the obvious question: Why does Macbeth decide that he has to kill the King to become King? And, anyway, why is he not sufficiently happy with the high social position he occupies and the honoured status he has acquired among his peers? There is a very simplistic answer to this, and that is to say he is too inpatient and too ambitious. Both of these are sins and therefore Macbeth must be punished for them.
As he believes that he is damned for eternity this breaks him down until he doesn't care or feel anymore. Banquo was also present when the witches' predictions were made which makes Macbeth insecure. There are two reasons for this;
. Banquo's children will become Kings and ...
2. ...Banquo may suspect that Macbeth murdered Duncan.
Macbeth is now in too deep to be repented for his sins and he knows this. To maintain his Kingship he decides to hire murderers to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. This takes Macbeth beyond the murder of Duncan; it demonstrates that he will spare no one - not even a close friend - to secure his illegitimate kingship. He has turned his back on his closest companion and doesn't feel any guilt. This suggests that he has now become just as evil as the witches. Shortly after the murder of Banquo, the dead noble appears at Macbeth's feast. The terror of seeing Banquo's ghost makes Macbeth more paranoid and insecure than ever, which leads him to seek answers from the three Witches;
'And betimes I will - to the weird sisters. / More shall they speak. For no I am bent to know / By the worst means, the worst ...'
This suggests that he still wants more and is still unhappy. He has tasted blood and now he wants more. He believes that he will lose his position as King unless he continues to kill. Eventually he has the blood of Duncan, Banquo, the two servants, Lady Macduff and her children on his hands. Blood is a very realistic image that helps people to relate blood and evil together.
The Factors Which Lead Macbeth To Kill The King
The witches play a vital role in Macbeth's thinking about his own life, both before and after the murder of Duncan. Banquo and Macbeth recognize them as something supernatural, part of the landscape but not fully human inhabitants of it. They have malicious intentions and prophetic powers and yet they are not active agents. When I say active agents I mean that they don't do anything other than talk and offer 'answers'. They have no power to compel.
The most obvious interpretation of the witches is to see them as manifestations of evil in the world. They exist to tempt and torment people, to challenge their faith in themselves and their society. Act 1 scene 3 suggests that the witches have power but not enough to kill. This is shown when they are talking among themselves about a woman who would not give one of the witches a chestnut. The witch tells her sisters that she will make the winds blow strongly against her husbands ship. They work on Macbeth by equivocation, that is, by ambiguous promises of some future state. These promises come true, but not in the way that the victim originally believed.
Macbeth takes his first step toward losing his soul when he is confronted with the knowledge that he will be king. The witches tell him;
'All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be King thereafter!'
When they say this he makes the mistake of letting his ambition overrule his judgment. If his judgment had remained intact in the face of the witches' powerful prophecy, he certainly would have decided not to let his actions be dictated by a prophecy given to him by three strange witches who evade most of the questions he asks.
The witches, appeal to what Macbeth wants to believe. They don't make him believe it and they do not tell him what to do in order to achieve what they prophesise. They say nothing about killing Duncan (or anyone else). In that sense, they cannot be the origin of the idea of the murder. They may be appealing to that idea, but they do not create it. The witches are said to be able to take possession of people and make them do wrong. This, seeing visions and going into trances are signs of this. The later two of these are shown, the second when Macbeth sees the ghostly dagger before he kills Duncan and the third, when he is described as 'rapt'.
These witches exist as constant reminders of the potential for evil in the human imagination. They are ineluctably part of the natural world, there to seduce anyone who, like Macbeth, lets his imagination flirt with evil possibilities. They have no particular abode and might pop up anywhere, momentarily, ready to incite an eternal desire for evil in the human imagination, the evil which arises from a desire to violate our fellow human beings in order to shape the world to our own deep emotional needs.
Guilt plays a strong role in motivating Macbeth, and causes Lady Macbeth to go insane, until she commits suicide. Throughout the story, there are many different types of guilty feelings that play a role in Macbeth's fatal decisions and bring Lady Macbeth to commit suicide. Although there are many instances that show the power guilt has played on the main characters, there are three examples that show this the best. One is, just after the murder of King, Duncan. Guilt overcomes Macbeth where he can no longer think straight. A second example is soon after that, where all the guilt Macbeth feels at first, changes into hate after he decides that Banquo must be killed as well. The last example is just about at the end of the play, when we see Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, and then later committing suicide; this all because of the burden of her guilt. All of these examples build the proof that in this play, guilt plays a very large role in the characters' lives. Perhaps one of the strongest evidences that show guilt, is how it affected Lady Macbeth. Act 5 begins by re-entering Lady Macbeth; this time though, she is not at all the woman we were first introduced to. It begins with a discussion between a doctor and a servant about the failing health of the lady herself. Lady Macbeth enters sleepwalking. She starts to rub her arms, in a washing motion and says;
'Out damned spot! Out, I say!'
She also says;
'...Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?'
The word blood, is really a image that we can use for the enormous guilt she feels and her action, in trying to get rid of the guilt by 'washing' and rubbing it away. In the second quote, the 'old man' represents, King Duncan. Her sleepwalking continues as she talks about the death of Lady Macduff;
'The thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now? / What, will these hands ne'er be clean?'
After the continuous rubbing motion, Lady Macbeth cries out;
'Here's the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.'
She realises that nothing could ever get rid of the smell of the blood and the guilt caused by all the murders committed by Macbeth. It's also shown here that she feels fully responsible for every person killed by her husband. Just several scenes later, Lady Macbeth commits suicide. The reason was just a build up of all the guilt.
Another big influence on Macbeth is Lady Macbeth. She puts considerable pressure on Macbeth and he is eventually persuaded to commit the murder of King Duncan. Driven by Lady Macbeth, he then orders the assassination of Banquo and Fleance and of Lady Macduff and her son. The attempted murders of Fleance and Lady Macbeth's son make it clear that Macbeth has no problems about killing the innocent. Being so deeply immersed in murder and death takes away his ability to feel; when Lady Macbeth dies, he reacts only by musing that;
'She should have died hereafter'.
One of the chief functions of Lady Macbeth in the early part of the play is to keep the vision of Kingship alive within Macbeth by any means at her disposal. She taunts him to act on his desires. What she is saying, in effect, is that he must not let his conscience stand in the way of his desires. Part of her tactics with Macbeth is to urge him to be more of a man. She identifies him as something unmanly.
Lady Macbeth should not be blamed for the actions of Macbeth. He freely chooses to kill Duncan in response to his own deepest desires. Neither his wife nor the witches compel him to do what he does, and he is free at any time to refuse to carry out the murder or, having carried it out, to seek out various courses of new action. But his decision to carry out the deed is marked by his, perhaps evil mind. In a way, Macbeth is never entirely satisfied with what he needs to do to become king or what he really wants to do.
After the murder of Duncan Lady Macbeth has thought that a little water and a few lies will clear them, but she cannot evade the psychological consequences of what she has encouraged Macbeth to do. She lacks his will power, his determination to continue, and his ability to withstand the inner torment. And so as he becomes more and more determined to keep killing his way to some final solution, she falls apart. This begins with her fainting spell as soon as the news of Duncan's death becomes public, continues in her anxious fussing before and after the banquet scene, reaches its clearest expression in her sleepwalking, and concludes in her suicide. This lack of inner will to confront the consequences of her and Macbeth's actions makes her story one without the tragic significance of her husband's.
The phrase 'lack of inner will' in the last paragraph is not meant to indicate some limitation in Lady Macbeth. She had thought that she could unsex herself, push away any of her deepest feelings about the love of others, and become a pure agent of destruction. So long as the murders have not started, she plays that role with great rhetorical effectiveness (especially in her taunts about Macbeth's manhood). In a way her reference to Duncan looking like her father does take on an important resonance.
What's particularly noticeable, too, is the way in which, following the murder of Duncan, their relationship becomes divided. We have every reason to believe that before Duncan's murder, they are very close. Certainly Macbeth shares all his thoughts and feelings with her, and she speaks to him about what her deepest thoughts are even if it is to defy Gods decision. They are at first a very close and loving couple but as more people are being killed by Macbeth (who mostly keeps them to himself and doesn't involve Lady Macbeth) Lady Macbeth is falling apart and being unable to cope with the guilt she commits suicide.
Conclusion
Graham Coomber
