Following Banquo’s “dispatch,” Macbeth has the family and household of Macduff (a nobleman who Macbeth perceives as a threat,) killed. By this point, Macbeth has become obsessed with control. Who else would kill so many people to stay on top? Feeling insecure about his position, he revisits the witches for reassurance, as he feels under threat from everyone and wants to be told he will remain king.
From the evidence above, we can see that Macbeth’s actions were indeed evil and bloody-minded. He killed only for personal gain, and needed little persuasion from his wife to go ahead. We do however have to take into account Macbeth’s continuous outbursts of guilt, which although short-lived, show that he is not happy with what he has done. He is so ashamed of his actions, he claims he will “sleep no more,” and throughout the rest of the play makes references to his lack of sleep. Further evidence of Macbeth’s personal responsibility for the evil in the play is made clear when soon after meeting the witches, he proclaims “chance may crown” him instead of him interfering in fate. However, I feel this was just an attempt to hide his true thoughts, as the queen managed to sway his opinion in less than 1 minute!
Lady Macbeth is a name that keeps cropping up in the summary of Macbeth I have made above. Time and again she is seen to be guiding Macbeth towards his ambition. However, is this characterisation fair, and if so, is lady Macbeth therefore the one responsible for the evil in the play?
It is true to say that Lady Macbeth shared her husband’s ambition. It is a quality they both posses and probably one of the reasons they get on so well at the beginning of the play. When Macbeth tells her about the witches and their prophecy, she remarks that Macbeth has the ambition but not “the illness to attend it.” By this, she means Macbeth is not cruel or ruthless enough to commit such a deed. She then calls on the devil to fill her with the “direst cruelty,” as she intends to be evil ‘for’ Macbeth.
This display of sheer evil and heartlessness by Lady Macbeth indicates what feelings she had at the start of the play. However, we must take into account that as a woman of some social status, Lady Macbeth had probably never killed anyone before, and had no understanding of what kind of an impact it would have on her. This is made evident by the way her actions slowly creep up on her throughout the rest of the play. A clear example of this is when she try’s to calm Macbeth after Duncan’s murder by telling him, “a little water will clear us of this deed.” However, by the end of the play, she has become so distressed, she said to herself that “not all the perfumes of Arabia” would clean her of the crime she has committed. From this change in attitude, we can see that she is remorseful and regrets her original behaviour. However, despite this change of heart, it was still Lady Macbeth who tipped Macbeth over the edge and made him commit that terrible murder.
Although Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were both very ruthless and hard-nosed, this could not have always been the case. Macbeth was an honest and brave warrior to whom the king had built an “absolute trust,” while Lady Macbeth was his loving wife to whom Macbeth kept no secrets. So to find the root cause of the evil in the play, it may be helpful to look at where the idea first originated. This of course was at the beginning of the play when Macbeth and Banquo stumbled into the witches cavern. Here, witches told Macbeth he would become “King of Scotland.” It was the same witches who, later on in the play assured Macbeth he would remain king until “Great Birnham wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come,” or in other words until the forest uproots itself and moves to his castle. Macbeth took this literally and assumed nothing could harm him until the trees “unfix his earthbound root.” Because of this deception by the witches, Macbeth was lulled into a false sense of security and continued to behave as he did. So, we can see from this that the witches are partly responsible for Macbeth’s actions, as they instilled the ideas and the thoughts into his head that drove him to such lengths. From the second example, we can see the power the witch’s words have over him. By telling him he will be hamed by “none of woman born,” they make him think he is invincible, showing a complete trust in whatever they say, however outrageous.
The witches therefore, through their persuasive words and Magic, turned Macbeth (and consequently his wife,) from a valiant soldier, into an evil traitor, who thought of nothing but his own personal gain.
To Summarise, we have seen that Macbeth himself is partly responsible for his actions, as is his wife, and the witches. However, which is most responsible for the evil? In my opinion, the person most answerable to the charge is Macbeth himself. I think this because although the witches promised him greatness, they said the same about Banquo (who was with him at the time,) and yet they took the news in completely different ways. Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition,” caused him to take the news very seriously, and worked on changing his own destiny, while Banquo accepted what had been said and carried on with life. It could be argued however that Macbeth’s wife was the one at fault as she swung him around. However, although Macbeth voiced genuine doubts to the audience, these were so easily brushed aside by Lady Macbeth’s speech I don’t think they could have been very deep rooted.
So to conclude, Macbeth was most responsible for the evil in the play as he alone kept trying to grab the carrot dangled before him by the witches, with Lady Macbeth doing nothing but shouting encouragement in the background.
