Behind the Arras

Our images of Macbeth start with the witches, and then go on to the Macbeths gazing in horror at their bloody hands, and then maybe extend to Banquo's ghost, with "twenty mortal murders on his crown," sitting in Macbeth's seat at the banquet table, and maybe-maybe-maybe beyond that to Macduff making a final entrance with a gruesome thing on a skewer.

Working through the play yet once more, however, what I keep finding is children, and beyond them parents, and beyond them families.

Shakespeare is fascinated, even obsessed, with families, from the fractured group of Aegeus, Aemilia, and their twin sons and twin servants in Comedy of Errors at the beginning of his career, to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and the joyously received baby Elizabeth at the end. Comedies start with broken families and end with new ones just starting out. Histories follow one Plantagenet with a father and some uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and one or more sons and nephews (and a wife or two, and even one daughter!) through four plays, and then another similar set through four more. Tragedies turn out to be comedies manquées, in which already cracked families are broken to pieces, and despite some promising early steps are decisively not renewed.

Shakespeare only occasionally presents us with an image of even a small complete family group—mother, father, child. Very briefly, if unequivocally, at the beginning and end of Merry Wives and at the end of Comedy of Errors and Pericles. Briefly and equivocally in I Henry IV (the Yorks) and at the end of All’s Well. Most extensively, and very equivocally, in Romeo and Juliet. Far more commonly we find childless couples, or single fathers or mothers (but not both together), and one or more children, and then perhaps some uncles and nephews and cousins.

The Scottish play does not break the mold: the familial element is subtle but inescapable. Lord and Lady Macbeth are childless (though Lady M says she has “given suck,” there are no living kids). Duncan has two sons but not, evidently, a surviving wife, and his death not only leaves the boys fatherless, but also separates them from one another. Banquo has a son but no wife; his death makes Fleance an exiled orphan. At the end of the play we meet the soldier Siward and his soldier son; the latter is Macbeth’s final victim. There is one whole family, the Macduffs. We do not see them together, however: Macduff the paterfamilias leaves Fife and Scotland for England to join the resistance to Macbeth’s increasingly tyrannical rule, and in his absence the tyrant brutally slaughters his wife and children.

In a way this moment serves as the moral hinge of the play. Until then, the murderous usurper carries all before him. It is as though killing other noblemen to gain and sustain political power were so normal as to be quite acceptable; indeed, if you read the preceding and following chapters of Raphael Holinshed’s chronicle history of Great Britain, Shakespeare’s source for this and many other plays, you get the idea that Macbeth’s bloody deeds were just business as usual. When Macbeth orders his underlings to kill Lady Macduff and the Macduff children, however, for no reason of state but apparently only out of spite at Macduff’s refusal to honor him, some crucial line is crossed, and thereafter everything goes wrong for the tormented king.

The sequence of scenes is powerfully suggestive. Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, and is deeply shaken. He consults the Weird Sisters and is initially cheered to learn that his throne is secure unless an impossible event occurs—that the trees of Birnam Wood cross the 15-mile width of the Tay valley to Dunsinane Castle. Then he is further shaken by apparitions that show Banquo’s descendants, not his, mounting the throne of Scotland. He learns of Macduff’s flight to England and resolves to “give to th’edge of the sword / His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (4.2.150-52). That is, if Macbeth cannot found a dynasty, neither can Macduff. The next scene mingles apprehension with comedy, as Lady Macduff snaps out irritably at her absent husband and their feisty son cracks witticisms on politics and violence. Their murder (perhaps by a member of their own household secretly also working for Macbeth) is swift and brutal. News of their deaths rouses Macduff to seek vengeance, and he it is, in single combat, who kills Macbeth and brings the usurper’s head to the stage as evidence. At the end of the play, not even partial families remain on the stage—Lady Macbeth has died before her husband, perhaps by her own hand, Siward’s son has fallen to Macbeth, Macduff is a childless widower, the unmarried and virginal Malcolm has only an absent brother. The final lines speak of reunification and a promising future, but phenomenologically, the family units that might produce it are nowhere to be found.

David Evett
ASP Scholar in Residence