TEXTS AND GENRES

ELEMENTS OF THE GOTHIC

GOTHIC MACBETH A STUDENT GUIDE INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare would not have thought of Macbeth as a gothic play when he wrote it in 1606. It should be remembered that the term gothic has to be applied retrospectively to Shakespearean drama and other sixteenth and seventeenthcentury plays, in that the generic term was not widely used until sometime later. However, English drama in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods had many of the qualities that characterise the Gothic. Many plays were preoccupied with mortality and the constant presence of death. There was a strong sense of the darkness within the human soul and the presence of evil in the world. Dramatists took as their themes family discord, power struggles, political rebellion, sin and damnation. Many, including Shakespeare, combined tragic and comic effects within their plays. This broke with the rules of classical drama, but enabled writers to explore extremes of feeling and strongly contrasting effects. Macbeth is a fascinating play in terms of its use of gothic elements and has influenced many literary representations of evil in later gothic texts. This guide will focus on particular gothic elements within the play, but the dramatic impact of Macbeth within the theatre is the result of the interplay of these elements within any particular production. The strange gothic power of the play is fascinatingly captured by actors superstitious reluctance to utter the plays name within the walls of theatres.

The guide will focus on the following elements: The Supernatural: The Status of the Witches Dreams, Fantasies and the Sleep of Reason Political Macbeth: Order, Rebellion and Chaos Macbeth: The Embodiment of Gothic Terror Lady Macbeth: Sexuality and Insanity Metaphysical Macbeth: Evil, Transgression, Insecurity and the Cauldron of the Skull

The Supernatural and the Status of the Witches:

When the play Macbeth was written in 1606, witches and witchcraft were a topical and, for many, very real subject. King James I had written a learned book on the subject and suspected the hand of the devil in any plot against an anointed king. He even believed that witches had at various points in his own life conspired to harm him, and feared the existence of occult, invisible forces bent on bringing all things to ruin. The opening scene of Macbeth, places before the audience the presence of three witches. Their status to a Jacobean audience would have seemed far more real than it will to a modern day audience. However, the play deliberately seems to equivocate over the status of the witches, just as the witches equivocate with Macbeth through their riddling words. It is Macbeths first encounter with these hags the weird sisters that seems to initiate his descent toward murder and tyranny. But what kind of power do these malevolent and bearded women have over Macbeth? Are they

responsible, by magical influence or by planting the idea in his mind, for his decision to kill Duncan? Do they somehow have knowledge of a predestined fate, as if they have seen the script of the play before it is performed? Or, alternatively are they symbols of Macbeths psychological condition onto which he projects his horrible imaginings (1.3. 137)? It is worth noting that in the original spelling in the Folio edition of the play the word weird was printed as weyward and that this word derives from an Old English word for fate. But do these strange creatures actually control destiny or the plot of the play? You will need to ask yourself what you think the nature of the three witches actually is. Actors responses to these questions have varied widely, though all productions realise the theatrical importance of the witches scenes and that it matters greatly how they are presented in a particular production. However, the text of the play seems to maintain the ambiguous status of the witches by design. Macbeth asks them What are you? when he first encounters them and receives in reply his own name: All hail Macbeth (1.345-6). Banquo continues to question the witches asking them if they truly exist or are merely figments of his imagination; but his question too remains unanswered. When Macbeth and Banquo demand to know more, the witches vanish: what seemed corporal / Melted as breath into the wind (1.3. 79-80). This capacity of the witches to simply melt away is perhaps part of their essential ambivalence within the play. If all the evil in the play could be attributed to the witches, the audience could focus on a defined external source of demonic evil. Alternatively, if the witches could be dismissed as pure fantasy, evil would have to be seen as the result of human causes in a secular world. What makes the witches presence in Macbeth so essentially gothic is the plays refusal to define their status and the uneasy uncertainty this produces. Stephen Greenblatt sums up this ambiguity when he writes about how Shakespeare shows a bleeding of the demonic into the secular and the secular into the demonic. The point of persecution of witches in Shakespeares age was to achieve clarity, to compel full confessions, to pass judgement and to escape from the terror of the inexplicable, the unforeseen and the aimlessly malignant. In Macbeth, the audience is shown visible proof of the demonic in action, but this evidence of the forces of darkness turns out to be frustratingly uncertain. The language of the play often undermines the certainties of sight and the

forces of renewed order and morality. The ambiguities of demonic agency are never resolved and its horror spreads like a mist through a murky landscape.

Task: Look back at the scenes in which the witches appear and write a twenty minute essay on the role of the supernatural in Macbeth.

Dreams, Fantasies and the Sleep of Reason:

When ideas of the gothic began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, they were in many ways a reaction to notions of good order and good taste which had been founded on a fundamental belief in rationalism and the power of human reason to control the baser instincts, passions and desires. The waking reason (together with conscience), was believed to have been given to humanity to protect them from the temptation to indulge their immoral and criminal imaginings. Inevitably, the most vulnerable condition of the human mind is during sleep when reason is unable to control the fantasies of the liberated imagination. In this the picture of Reason Monsters the Spanish encapsulates essential central to tradition. context, The Sleep Produces drawn by artist Goya an opposition the gothic

The very title of Goyas picture signals the gothic message: when reason sleeps, as everything must, the hitherto repressed monsters will emerge, both threatening and terrifying precisely because they have been repressed. This message prefigures Sigmund Freuds (1856-1939) later insights into psychological repression and its potentially devastating impact on mental health. There is an underlying acceptance in this gothic realisation that to repress emotions, feelings and desires is to make them all the more terrifyingly distorted when they do, inevitably, emerge. Although all these gothic ideas post-date Shakespeare, there are clearly links between the gothic conceptions of the battle between reason and imagination and the potential for fantasy and dream to produce nightmarish visions of criminal and damnable acts that are relevant to a discussion of Macbeth. From the moment the witches offer their riddling prophecies, many characters become susceptible to terrible dreams and lawless fantasies- merciful powers, Banquo prays, restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose (2.1.7-9) but not everyone gives way to them in waking reality.

Macbeth, who is fully aware that wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep (2.1.50-1), nonetheless crosses the fatal line between criminal desire to criminal act. The will to gain power exhibited by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are normally kept in check by ethical and religious considerations which Macbeth initially voices (1.7.12-28), when he considers his position in relation to Duncan. Lady Macbeth seeks to free up Macbeths ambitious will by releasing him from his sickly fears of damnation so that he can act with ruthless violence. She has to try to put Macbeths reason and his fear of guilty conscience to sleep. The sleeping and the dead, she tells her husband, are but as pictures. Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil. This reassurance, however, proves to be hopelessly shallow. The spectral dagger, the ghost sitting in Macbeths chair and the indelible bloodstains on Lady Macbeths hands all chillingly demonstrate there is no easy escape from the judgements of a guilty conscience. The dream of a clean regicide proves psychologically untenable: the seizure of the crown leads to feverish sleeplessness, brooding anxiety about security and an overwhelming sense of defilement. The play explores the consequences of acting out fantasies of power in the psychological responses of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth in the wake of the crime. It is impossible to trammel up the consequence of crime to find a safe resting place. There are no clean murders. Lady Macbeth experiences a gradual breakdown as her growing horror finally breaks forth in the nightmarish sleepwalking scene with her compulsive attempts to free herself of the smell and stain of blood. Macbeth, in his quest to achieve security only finds that one bloody crime leads to another in an endless catalogue of murderous acts. For both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, their initial dream of power through regicide only leads to the nightmare of guilt ridden kingship. There can be no sleep for either as Macbeth seemed to realise the moment he had committed the fatal act: Methought I heard a voice cry Sleep no more, / Macbeth does murder sleep (2.2.33-34). For the guilty pair, the dream of the crown translates only into a nightmare of unlawful kingship.

Task: Write a twenty minute essay on the relationship between reason, conscience and guilt in Macbeth.

Political Macbeth: Order, Rebellion and Chaos

The play begins with an act of political rebellion. The Thane of Cawdor, on whom Duncan had built An absolute trust, proved a traitor in his revolt against the king. The opening scenes report the bloody battles that restore order to the state and visit execution on the traitor. Regicide, in the political theology of Jacobean England, was close to the ultimate crime, a demonic assault not simply on an individual and a community but on the fundamental order of the universe. In many of Shakespeares plays, most notably in Richard II, characters give voice to the theory of the divine right of kings. In this theory, the king is believed to be Gods deputy on earth

and consequently attacks upon him are evil. In Macbeth, the Kings claim to sacred authority is extremely strong both in Scotland and in England. As a result, the play exhibits a metaphysical horror of regicide. Duncans murder is marked in the natural world with dreadful signs and portents of which Lennox speaks at some length: The night has been unruely. . . (2.3. 50-57). The moment Macduff discovers the body of the King he utters the repeated phrase: O horror, horror, horror! and then reinforces the sacrilegious nature of the murder through a metaphor that equates the Kings body with a temple that has been defiled: Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lords anointed temple and stole thence / The life oth building (2.3.63-65). Macbeths act of regicide is an act of rebellion against the most fundamental and sacred structures of Jacobean society. It threatens to undermine the secular and sacred laws that maintained order and authority in the state. The consequences of Macbeths actions cannot be over stated in terms of the chaos and confusion they unleash. Ironically, for Macbeth, however, an unlawfully gained crown can never sit securely on his head. The regicide and traitor must live in perpetual fear and insecurity. His reign as king will inevitably be haunted by his fears of a challenge to his own authority and future acts of rebellion and regicide. In Shakespeares plays, evildoers may wreak havoc for a time, but in the final restoration of order and justice, they and their principal accomplices are almost inevitably punished. Thus at the end of the play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are dead and Malcolm talks of settling scores with the cruel ministers / Of this butcher and his fiend-like queen (5.11.34-35). Yet while the play has implicated the witches in Macbeths monstrous assault on civilized society, there is no attempt to punish them, no sign that the victors are even aware of their existence. This omission is more surprising when we remember that at the time Shakespeare wrote this play, the authorities in England and Scotland were still bringing women to trial on charges of witchcraft and executing them. The play refuses to resolve questions about whether the rebellion against order and the divine right of the king is purely instituted by Macbeth himself or whether Macbeth is merely an instrument of malign forces at work that seek to destroy Gods divine plan for the universe. Task: Write a twenty minute essay on ways in which Macbeth uses rebellion to explore instabilities within the structure of society.

Macbeth as the embodiment of Gothic Terror

Macbeth is a character who embodies many of the features that have come to be seen as essential aspects of the gothic protagonist. These are summarised by Adrian Beard and Pete Bunten as: some degree of tragic stature of high social rank somehow foreshadowed by doom a tendency to be influenced by past events sharply contrasting qualities within the character the possession of considerable powers a strikingly physical presence a strongly sexual element driven by some all-consuming passion a connection with the exotic an occasional association with what is bestial or non-human

While it is possible to explore Macbeths character in relation to such features, it is more interesting to examine ways in which Shakespeare constructed the character of Macbeth and how these contribute to his gothic nature. Shakespeare took the main story of Macbeth from Holinsheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587). In this version of the story, Banquo aids Macbeth in the murder of the King. Shakespeare suppresses this complicity and specifically presents Banquo as a man who despite being told by the witches that he will be the father of kings, seems determined not to be drawn into any conspiracy to realise the prophesies. Banquo speaks quite clearly of keeping his allegiance clear (2.1.27). Macbeths only co-conspirator in Shakespeares play is his wife. Innocent of any crime against the King, Banquo is killed because Macbeth fears and envies him and wants to prevent the crown from possibly passing to his heirs. Other significant changes Shakespeare made in his source materials further intensify Macbeths isolation and his evil: in Holinsheds Chronicles, Duncan is a relatively young and feeble ruler, and Macbeth, having murdered him, goes on to reign successfully for ten years. In Shakespeares play, Duncan is a mature and virtuous king, and Scotland ruled by Macbeth experiences a nightmare of cruelty and bloodshed. What is absolutely clear about Shakespeares villain Macbeth is that he is fully aware of the wickedness of his deeds and is tormented by his awareness. He

has a clear understanding of the difference between good and evil and he chooses evil even though the choice horrifies and sickens him. It is his conscious decision to follow a path of evil towards his own damnation that intensifies Macbeths gothic qualities. It is his potential to choose another route and to avoid evil that makes Macbeths fall from grace so much more shocking and disturbing. Before he has taken the irrevocable step, Macbeth tries to recover his moral bearings. The deed he is contemplating, he begins by telling himself, would work only if he could control all consequences, so that this blow might be the be-all and the end-all (1.7.5). But he realises that there is no possibility of controlling events in this way. He then considers the overwhelming ethical arguments against the murder: he is the Kings kinsman, subject and host and he accepts that the Kings virtues would plead like angels against the deep damnation of his taking off (1.7.20). Macbeth understands absolutely what is at stake and the moral evil killing the King constitutes. At the end of his soliloquy in Act 1, scene 7, Macbeth is clear about his decision when he tells his wife: We will proceed no further in this business (1.7.31). Why then does Macbeth change his mind and commit a crime he cannot even contemplate without horror? A significant part lies in the role played by Lady Macbeth. However, what allows the audience to dissect Macbeths moral and psychological degeneration and to experience it with such gothic intimacy and terror is the plays use of soliloquies

The development of Macbeths moral and psychological disintegration can be charted through his main soliloquies. To explore the inner turmoil of Macbeths descent into evil is to witness a horrifying representation of gothic corruption. The main soliloquies to analyse are the following: (1.7.1-28) beginning: If it were done when tis done. . . (2.1.33-64) beginning: Is this a dagger I see before me. . . In the first of these soliloquies Macbeth expresses his clear moral awareness of the difference between good and evil and the bonds of allegiance he owes to the King. In the second of these soliloquies Macbeth confronts a spectral image of a dagger that both leads him towards the damnable murder of Duncan and allows him to contemplate the monstrosity of his violent act.

Once Macbeth has committed himself to a pathway of transgression, there is no turning back. Macbeths story throughout the rest of the play plots the appalling actions undertaken to cover up the initial crime which leads inevitably to an escalation of bloody murders and the insecure paranoia of a gothic tyrant. However, unlike Lady Macbeths gradual decomposition in the face of her growing horror of her crimes that surfaces in her psychological and mental torment, Macbeths response is different. Initially gripped by a heightened sense of fear, Macbeth seems initially to disintegrate when confronted by the spectre of his bloody deeds in the form of Banquos ghost. However, in many respects his state of mind becomes more terrible when he experiences a gradual numbing of his moral senses and becomes almost anaesthetised to the horror of further murders before reaching a state of absolute spiritual emptiness. These states of moral and spiritual indifference are unforgettably expressed firstly when Macbeth declares: I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go oer (3.5.135-137). And finally in Macbeths response to the news of Lady Macbeths death and his nihilistic expression of the pointlessness of existence full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing (5.526-527). Macbeth is a representation of so much in gothic literature that disturbs us. He enacts a moral transgression in the full knowledge of the evil he commits and degenerates into a tyrannical monster that moves from regicide to infanticide. And yet, most terrifying of all is not the spectacle of his bloody acts of butchery but the portrait of the psychological, moral and spiritual decay of an evil man. Task: Write a twenty minute essay on ways in which Macbeth can be viewed as a typical gothic protagonist.

Lady Macbeth: Sexuality and Insanity

The representation of female figures within gothic literature is often seen to be stereotypical with women falling into two main types: the trembling victim or the predatory femme fatale. Lady Macbeth defies both roles and yet represents a version of female gothic transgression in her sexuality and power and the consequences of such transgression in her descent into madness and selfdestruction.

These two aspects of her character can be seen most clearly in Act 1 in the scenes leading up to Duncans murder and in the sleepwalking scene in Act 5, scene 1. The most disturbing speeches uttered by Lady Macbeth occur not just when she invokes evil but when she does so with a language that denies and distorts her maternal nature. Not only does she speak disparagingly of her husbands human kindness but she summons demonic powers with her invocation: Come, you spirits, / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty (1.5.38-41). She continues in similar vein: Come to my womans breasts, / And take my milk for gall (1.5.45-46). Her communing with the forces of darkness is expressed in terms that seek to remove the compunctious visitings of her female nature. Later, in one of the plays most disturbing images, Lady Macbeth expresses a fantasy of infanticide: I have given suck, and know How tender tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluckd my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out (1.7.54-58) The gothic impact of Lady Macbeths transgression has less to do with her demonic pact than with the inversions of her female nature that she is willing to contemplate to fulfil her ambition for power. However, when it comes to her manipulation of Macbeth, she adopts the powerful weapon of sexual taunting: Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valour As thou art in desire? .. When you durst do it, then you were a man. (1.7.39-41, 49) Lady Macbeths evil allows her at one and the same time to deny her maternal nature and to control her husband by invoking her sexuality. It is this capacity to distort her female identity to gain her political ends that makes Lady Macbeth at once a potent force for evil and a transgressive figure of the female gothic.

However, while Lady Macbeth exhibits a cold, calculating character throughout the planning of Duncans murder, her personality soon loses its composure and disintegrates into a state of growing horror that breaks forth unforgettably in the sleepwalking scene in Act 5, scene 1. Instead of her confident assertion that a little water clears us of this deed (2.2.65), Lady Macbeths hands become the focus of her obsessive attempts to remove the smell and stain of the blood that sits so uneasily on her conscience: All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand (5.1.42-43). Lady Macbeths descent into madness reveals the archetypal gothic consequences of transgression; for once the protective agencies of reason and conscience have been removed, there is nothing left to defend the mind from the moral monstrosities it has set free.

Task: Write a twenty minute essay discussing ways in which Lady Macbeth contributes gothic elements to the play.

Metaphysical Macbeth : Evil, Insecurity and the Cauldron of the Skull

Macbeth is a play that is part of a tradition of theological and philosophical brooding on the nature of evil. Macbeths regicide is both a criminal act in a secular sense and a damnable sin in a religious context and the play maintains both fields of discourse. However, what makes the gothic exploration of evil so unnerving is the plays refusal to define any single source of evil and to suggest that evil is indiscernible from good and lurks within everyone. Stephen

Greenblatt writes brilliantly on the different forms of disturbance and anxiety Macbeth forces the audience to contemplate: If the mind is subject to supernatural soliciting (1.6.1-3) from some bizarre place, it is gripped still more terribly and irresistibly by horrible imaginings (1.3.37) from within. If there is sexual disturbance out on the heath, where the bearded hags stir the ingredients of their hideous caldron, there is deeper sexual disturbance at home, in the murderous intimacy of the marital bond: When you durst do it, then you were a man. If you worried about losing your manhood, it is not enough to hunt for witches; look to your wife. If you are anxious about your future, scrutinize your best friends: He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust (1.4.13-14). If you are worried about interior temptation, fear your own dreams: Merciful powers, Restrain in me the cursd thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose. (2.1.7-9) And if you fear spiritual desolation, turn your eyes on the contents not only of the hideous caldron but on your skull: O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! (3.2.37). Macbeth offers no simplistic reassurance of a final restoration of order. For like all the best works of gothic literature, it suggests that the forces of sexual, mental, moral, political and metaphysical disturbance are to be found within every one of us. Task: Write a twenty minute essay discussing ways in which Macbeth explores states of gothic uncertainty and confusion.