BY Dr. U. C. NAG, M.A., Ph. D.

In Shakespeare's presentment of Macbeth¹ we saw a character in process of development, and development of character was accompanied by a corresponding development of feeling in the spectators. Such is also the case with the presentment of Lady Macbeth. The two cases are, however, parallel but opposite, not similar but contrasted. The development of character, function and emotion in the case of the woman are the reverse of what they were in the case of the man. In the opening of the play the wife functions more powerfully and largely than the husband; but she is no longer the master spirit when Duncan has been provided for and finally passes out of the action altogether. She commences with an ecstasy of criminal resolution but sinks into listlessness and nerveless apathy. She excites horror at her entry, but the pendulum has almost swung to pity as she departs, if we may dare to pity her. In each respect she is contrasted with her husband, who as the play progresses gathers up all the threads of action into his own hands, accumulates murder upon murder till horror is a familiar spirit without power to make him start, and wins the deepest reprobation from those who looked at him with admiration upon a first acquaintance.

The story of Lady Macbeth falls naturally into four stages, three of which are included within the limits of the play. The first, as in the case of Macbeth himself, precedes the action and is drawn for us only by suggestive hints.

At her first appearance–which opens the second part of her story–Lady Macbeth can only be described as appalling, but so appalling as to be sublime. She exhibits the sublime awfulness of the relentless storm-wave or the irresistible and pitiless tornado. Her eyes are fixed upon a goal, she takes "the nearest way" with an inflexibility of wll that stops for no obstacles, and, an unperplexed singleness of purpose that is in fact invincible. She appears before us as the most awe-inspiring picture of sheer will-power that tragedy can show. By virtue of that will-power she has burst through the sphere of common morality and lives in a world, where power is its own law. She is not immoral but non-moral, for to her exultant will moral distinctions do not exist. The only obstacles which in her view need to be reckoned with are those which spring from the disparity between her power to will and her power to do. Her will is triumphant, it sweeps her husband forward, it lifts her beyond the discomforting touch of scruple, it seizes upon possibilities and converts them into allies. But she is, after all, a woman and conscious of feminine weaknesses which perhaps she resents. These weaknesses dare to raise an inward protest against the onward march of her exultant will and must, therefore, be crushed. The spirits that tend on mortal thoughts must be invoked "to unsex her and fill her from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty," a cruelty her nature protests against, but forced into being at the demand of her will. But though the protest is stilled, it is not killed; and in spite of the assistance of wine from which boldness is to spring Macbeth must commit the deed which his wife cannot bring herself to do with her own hand.

There is a touch of impatience in the excuse. She resents this last persistent trace of weakness, this failure of her will to overpower herself, this weak lingering of a protest to which she would give no quarter. But the little weakness is not fanned into any strength by sentiment, and is not allowed to unnerve her for what remains to do. The will remains inflexible, its courage is in no way abated and a firm, unwavering course is steadily pursued.

Such is Lady Macbeth in the first two acts of the drama. Inflexibility of will, and fearless courage seem her most prominent characteristics. But these do not exhaust the character and three considerations may be suggested here to complete our picture.

(1) In the first place we must notice the goal towards which her will is bent. It is, in a word, the crown. But the crown for whom? Is her ambition personal, for herself? Or does she forget herself in the thought of her husband? The question forces itself upon us. But I shall merely raise it here and answer it later.

(2) The second point to notice is that Lady Macueth is, like her husband, the victim of an internal conflict though her conflict is not his. Macbeth is torn asunder between his high ambition on the one hand, and the vision of imagined fears on the ether. These encounter his ambition and the result is a civil war within the mind which "shakes his single state of man and make it suffer the nature of an insurrection." In Lady Macbeth the conflict is between sex and determination; between nature and the human will; and in the issue of that conflict lies the tragedy of her life. That she herself should have failed to perceive the inevitable issue is due to a limitation of character which marks yet another contrast between her husband and herself and brings us on to the third consideration of which I have spoken.

(3) Lady Macbeth had, in comparison with Macbeth, but little imagination. Macbeth was ‘of imagination all compact’; his wife was colder-witted. The realism of the wife is in the most marked contrast to the imagination of the husband and is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the scene which follows the murder of Duncan.

The blood to her is but a filthy witness, to him it grows into a vision of the multitudinous seas incarnadined; the noises of the night, the sudden knocking, seem to him to come from a disturbed supernatural world; to her they are the noises of owls and crickets and a knocking at the south entry. This limitation was, as we have already seen, at once her weakness and her strength. It veiled the horrors of the deed but it also fatally concealed its consequences. For a moment indeed she is startled, for a moment she is not sure that her husband's imagination is all fancy, but it is only for a moment. With sudden seriousness she turns to him with the words:

She breaks in "what do you mean?" half doubting whether this was not a real voice that he had heard. Then almost directly she recovers herself, convinced of the vanity of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself better than him. She never suspects that these deeds must be thought after these ways; that her facile realism, "a little water clears us of this deed" will one day be answered by herself, "will these hands ne’er be clean?" or that the fatal commonplace "what's done is done" give place in no distant future to the infinitely regretful "what's done cannot be undone." Thus do these two prepare their tragedy by a union of opposites and the imaginative horrors of the man prove the ruin of both, through the failure of the woman to estimate them at their worth.

From this point of the drama Lady Macbeth abandons all initiative. She suggests no more crimes; she contrives no more plots; she no longer stimulates her husband’s purposes; nay, she no longer shares them. A languid listlessness is settling down upon her soul, the weariness of utter depression has fastened upon her soul which is only pierced by one consuming anxiety on her husband's account.

She shares no longer in her husband's actions, but she is afraid for him with an absorbing fear and her one positive emotion is anxiety lest he should betray his misery and himself. Stimulated by this she makes one supreme effort in the banquet scene. For a moment she is strong again; for the moment she is the stronger spirit and has the ascendancy; but when the guests are gone, she is exhausted and the daily listlessness returns; and with its entry the note of terror is replaced by the note of pathos. There is to my mind nothing more pathetic in this tragedy than the short colloquy which ensues after the departure of the guests when the husband and wife are left alone.

Macbeth's morbid imaginings pass by unheeded, his imperious questions meet with listless submissive answers that seem to come with difficulty. Lady Macbeth is changed indeed. And we cannot be insensible to the deep pathos in the answer which at once tells of her care for him and of the misery she herself silently endures.

And it is a misery she endures alone. Lady Macbeth is now in absolute solitude of the soul. She sees her husband's tortures of mind, he indeed dilates upon them when they are together, but she will not burden him with any mention of her own. Her only weakness of will is a horror of the dark. She must have light by her continually to relieve the terrors of loneliness, for the heart is sorely charged. Yet she asks for no sympathy, she craves no comfort, she keeps her lips resolutely closed, but her resolution is relaxed in sleep. And in that state of pitiful unconsciousness she reveals the disquietude of her mind.

And so she slowly sinks into the final stage of madness. She is carefully watched. "The means of all annoyance" is carefully kept from her. But in spite of all precautions the day soon comes when the wild cry of women is heard and the terse message comes to Macbeth, "The Queen, my lord, is dead." Lady Macbeth has cut short by one last determined stroke the agony of her life.

It was evidently an agony too bitter to be borne. But where in did it consist? Was it an agony of repentance? This can hardly be maintained. Campbell was surely right when in alluding to Mrs. Jameson's analysis he insisted that in Lady Macbeth's misery there is no trace of contrition. Lady Macbeth repents no more than does her husband. Her unconscious revelations tells us of a horror at the sight of blood which she had overcome but not killed. It is, however, not the shame of penitence but the horror of strong physical repulsion, such as any woman must naturally feel–" Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" It is too cold-blooded for contrition. She betrays a knowledge of Macbeth's greatest atrocity and laments it– "The Thane of Fife had a wife, where is she now?" She would never have approved of mere, atrocity—she was not naturally cruel–she knew she must be unsexed to be that–and it is her husband's deed not hers of which she speaks. So far as her own deeds are concerned there is besides the physical horror at the sight and touch of blood only one other element in her unconscious utterances–fear of discovery for her husband and the attempt to put down that fear: "What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account." "No more o' that, my lord, no more of that, you mar all with this starting." Wash your hands, put on your night-gown look not so pale. I tell you yet again Banquo's buried, he cannot come out on’s grave.

It was not contrition that filled Lady Macbeth's mind with scorpions, but hers was nevertheless an agony that should claim from us the response of pity, for these self-revelations of the night-walker have made its nature clear to us. It was a torture in which four separate torments united, anyone of which were sufficient to rack the mind into madness.

(1) There was first the torment of outraged womanhood. The perpetual, unceasing clamour of instincts temporarily thrust aside only to cry out for ever against a deed which excited them to infinite and eternal repulsion.

(2) There was secondly the torment of being compelled to watch the sufferings of a husband for whom she has sacrificed her very nature, combined with the racking pain of striving to minister comfort to a mind diseased, when her own mind was itself in need of the same comfort with none to administer it. "I tell you yet again Banquo's buried, he cannot come out on's grave." How many fruitless efforts of a worn-out spirit are hidden in that "yet again."

(3) There was once more the torment of knowing that it was her will which spurred her husband on to deeds from which such tortures have sprung to punish him. She meant so well; she gave him of her best; and it has come to this–to such a pass that for her and for him no better comfort can be found than the terrible reflection "what's done cannot be undone."

(4) There was finally the torment of being compelled to witness the degradation of the husband she loved, a growth of the most awful and purposeless wickedness–a growing savagery of crime in the one whom she most admired–"The Thane of Fife had a wife, where is she now?" It weighs upon her as the outcome of her own persuasion but an outcome she did not foresee and would have given worlds to prevent.

Thus Lady Macbeth suffers because she did a cruel deed without being cruel by nature. She suffers in her husband's sufferings and by the effort to alleviate them. She suffers because she contributed to her husband's ruin while seeking nothing but his advancement. The naturally cruel and loveless woman has been drawn by Shakespeare elsewhere; but Lady Macbeth is not Goneril. Goneril need have invoked no evil spirits to fill her with the direst cruelty. They were already there. Goneril would not have suffered in the sufferings of another, for of unselfish love she knew not.

We have, thus, found an answer to the question we raised as to Lady Macbeth's ambition, and our answer is that it was for her husband and in no way for herself. Nor is this answer merely an inference from suggestions in the play. Among the sources which Shakespeare used for his play was the graphic account of the history of Macbeth given by the chronicler, Holinshed. And in his use of Holinshed the dramatist's intentions are conveyed no less significantly by his omissions than by his borrowing's. Holinshed describes the effect upon Macbeth's mind by the nomination of Malcolm as heir-apparent to the throne, and tells us how he began to take counsel how he might usurp the kingdom by force having a just quarrel to do so (as he took the matter). The chronicle then proceeds: "the words of the three weird sisters also (of whom before you have heard) greatly encouraged him here unto but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen." Bearing this passage in mind it is deeply significant that nowhere is this ambition expressed in the play either by Lady Macbeth herself or by others for her. Her reference to the crown when she reveals herself in soliloquy contains no trace of ambition for herself but only of ambition for her husband:

Only one inference is possible. Shakespeare deliberately declined to use Holinshed's suggestion, and intended the exact opposite. Where a suggestion is emphatically made and not perceptibly followed the inference must be that it is rejected. Thus, the self-revelation of Lady Macbeth in soliloquy, the light thrown upon her sufferings by the lips of the sleep-walker, combined with a comparison of the play with its sources, prove conclusively that Lady Macbeth was devoured not by personal, ambition for herself, but by a consuming ambition for her husband.

We are now in a position to complete our picture of Lady Macbeth by gathering together the hints that tell us what she was before she entered on the path of crime.

It is to be borne in mind that the Gruoch of Holinshed is not the Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare. There are certain details relating to Gruoch in Holinshed that Shakespeare for artistic purposes has deliberately rejected, in the same way as he has done in respect of the character of Portia in Julius Ceasar. According to the chronicle Macbeth is the second husband of Gruoch, who married him after her first husband had been murdered in his castle. But Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, we are to assume in the absence of anything to the contrary, came to wed Macbeth in all the freshness of her youthful idealism, love and enthusiastic devotion to the interest of her husband. She has, thus, for Macbeth something of the self-annihilating passion of Juliet, as also some of the latter's idolising fancy. To her Macbeth must have appeared as the immaculate hero of her maiden dreams, and this adoration for him did not abate even after her marriage. She, thus, comes to be devotedly attached to her husband, and is more determinedly ambitious for him than he is for himself. The total absence of any other claims upon her love and affection naturally enough cause her whole love to centre upon her husband. And her love and determination are narrowed down to his career by the greatest loss of her life. She has known the joys of motherhood, and she has been visited by the pangs of bereavement.

A world of comment lies here. Hers was a nature meant for love and what it might have been if the babe had lived Shakespeare alone knows. But the babe was taken from her and her whole nature goes Out to her husband. His career is now the one thing to which she can devote herself. She is conscious of his great gifts and they are all to be devoted to the one great service–they are to carry her husband as high as he can go. She will not waste sweet words and pretty nothings upon him, however much he may caress her and speak to her the "little language" of the lover. Like Cordelia she prefers deeds to words as the expression of her love and she will watch, therefore, for opportunity to act. Nowhere is her husband without her influence upon him. We have noted an entire absence of principle in his character and this absence of principle must have been a potent factor in the development of his wife's ambitions. There was nothing to check or restrain her purposes, and to guide them into legitimate paths. She had no aids to help her to preserve a mental and a moral balance. Thus, out of fair beginnings there grows the gradual tyranny of the fixed idea. She is dominated by it, till it becomes her whole self. "She is in the grip of the most terrible form of selfishness–the selfishness of one for another." ² It is not too much to say that a person in this condition is not quite sane. The fixed idea is destructive of all sense of proportion and it is in a fairly adequate perception of proportions or in other words of right adjustments that sanity consists. Psychologists distinguish a certain class of actions as ideo-motor. They are those actions which follow upon an idea merely by reason of the vividness of that idea and without any conscious effort of the will. Action under a fixed idea tends to follow type and it does so in the case of Lady Macbeth. Her apparent inflexibility of the will and triumphant resoluteness of purpose are not really moral qualities at all. They are the outcome of the fixed idea irresistibly pushing her forward to its realisation. That is why she is beyond the reach of moral distinctions and can commit a cruel and horrible deed without perception of its horror and cruelty.

But when the goal is reached and the idea realised; when the crown is on her husband's head and he is seated on the throne, then the tyranny of the fixed idea is relaxed. It has spent itself, and other ideas have room to rush in. Moral ideas have, perhaps, been extinguished forever. They do not survive long–continued neglect, but the basal instincts of womanhood revive, and each one inflicts a separate wound upon the soul that has dared to outrage them.

The love from which that former tyranny was born survives, and survives unabated. But it is no longer the source of exultant purposes and quick activities; it has become the wielder of instruments of exquisite torture. Thus, the insanity of fixed idea gives place to the listlessness of passive suffering, and the mind grows more and more disordered beneath the strain of the reaction, till the end is sheer madness and the death of the suicide.

"Lady Macbeth," says Dr. Johnson with his usual air of finality, "is merely detested." But she is so only by one who has misread her character. More recent critics have tended to an opposite and waxed sentimental over her. They, however, have misread the mind of Shakespeare. Awe and horror, not untouched by the deepest pity, seem to combine in the impression he would leave on us. And it is not, perhaps, a misreading of a part of his intention to suppose that in the case of Lady Macbeth and in that of her husband, he would have us observe the play of forces let loose by the human hand only to overpower the human heart. In Macbeth we watched the tyranny of accumulated impulses exercised over a man possessed; in Lady Macbeth there is the same fact of possession, but it is due to the tyranny of fixed idea. In both the initial responsibility lies with the being ‘possessed’ for Shakespeare is no shallow fatalist. But in both cases forces are let loose upon life in which the human agent seems to be the instrument of evil influences from without. For both, therefore, reprobation, but for both some measure of pity, and for Lady Macbeth it should be a very large measure for her punishment comes through her love, and her ruin through her devotion to another–and this another her husband. And what devotion! what singleness of purpose! Only if it had a little more of moral discrimination which fate had barred from her by a triple bolt, the age she belonged to, the husband she wedded, and the last and greatest of all–her frustrated motherhood made all the more poignant and dark by the brief moment of its illumination.