What is the Source of Macbeth's Evil?

A bonus post for Halloween

Macbeth and Banquo encounter the witches for the first time by Théodore Chassériau (Wikimedia Commons).

I studied Macbeth at school so it’s been a while since I’ve re-read the text, although I’ve seen it a lot of stage and film productions. Most recently, I saw Ralph Fiennes play Macbeth in London (2024) and I’ve also watched a televised version of Christopher Ecclestone playing Macbeth for the RSC (2018) and I particularly love Justin Kurzel’s film from 2015.

But reading it, you reaslise that it’s more tightly plotted than many of Shakespeare’s other plays, and there’s so much fantastic imagery to enjoy: birds, blackness, sleep and blood (lots of it). It has a brooding, occult atmosphere which sucks you right in.

While the play’s supernatural themes are dramatic gold, they do present the reader with a problem: if Macbeth’s actions are the result of a supernatural influences, he does not have free will and therefore cannot be blamed. I’ve now come to see this as one of the central issues of the play.

What is gripping about it is the way in which Shakespeare keeps pulling the rug from under this interpretation to suggest that Macbeth does, in fact, have agency. Take for example, the moment when the witches reveal that ‘none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth’. His response is revealing:

Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee?

But yet I’ll make assurance double sure,

And take a bond of Fate: thou shalt not live…

In other words, I’ll just make doubly sure by killing Macduff anyway. This decision smacks of a personal bloodlust and seems to reject the idea that Macbeth is wholly controlled by fate or the supernatural. The play constantly asks us: What is the source of Macbeth’s evil – is it something external or is it of his own doing?

---

When I was studying this play at school, I remember a lot of discussion about how far Lady Macbeth could be blamed for her husband’s evil. I am less bothered by this question today, and, in many ways, it’s a remnant of 19th-century ideas about the play (Lady Macbeth’s unmotherly impulses were especially troubling for the Victorians). In the 1980s, I remember struggling with the disappointment that Shakespeare’s strongest (almost certainly shoulder-padded) female character is a Bad Person. Yet, re-reading the play now, it’s clear that her involvement in Macbeth’s tragic downfall is minimal. In fact, she’s soon excluded from her husband’s killing sprees, and, like Portia in Julius Caesar, conveniently dies as her husband is confronted by the consequences of his actions.

But, if Lady Macbeth merely puts the tragedy in motion, who is ultimately responsible? There’s a clue at the beginning, in an exchange between Banquo and Macbeth, who have just heard the witches’ first prophecy:

 Banquo: But ‘tis strange:

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of Darkness tell us truths;

 Macbeth: [Aside] Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial throne.

While Banquo questions it, Macbeth is only hearing what he wants to hear. This exchange reminded me of Hamlet’s problem with his father’s ghost. Does Hamlet encounter his father’s spirit, come from purgatory, or is it an evil spirit who has taken on his father’s shape to damn him? These are important theological questions which Hamlet must explore, putting in place the play-within-the-play to test if Claudius is, indeed, guilty of his father’s murder.

A certain amount of doubt is a good thing, such as when Macbeth balks at killing Duncan. Lady Macbeth’s skilful persuasion sets the tragedy in motion, but there is another moment of doubt/persuasion towards the end of the play which mirrors that of the Macbeths. When Macduff goes to England to enlist Duncan’s son, Malcolm, to lead an insurrection against Macbeth, Malcolm is unsure of his leadership abilities:

I grant [Macbeth] bloody,

Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,

Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin

That has a name; but there’s no bottom, none,

In my voluptuousness…

Your heart falls at this immature speech; but, at the same time, he is at least human. Malcolm then worries about his avarice, until Macduff loses his temper and exclaims:

Fit to govern?

No, not to live. – O nation miserable!

With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter’d,

When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again…

Luckily, it’s the wake-up call that Malcolm needs. Meanwhile, we find Macbeth dead-eyed and completely inured to violence. He has ‘supp’d full with horrors’ and believes no man born of woman can harm him. Doubts are the difference between Malcolm and Macbeth; doubts – humility – will make Malcolm a better ruler.

It’s not until his final moments that Macbeth comes around to Banquo’s way of thinking. As Birnam Wood appears to advance towards his castle, Macbeth says:

I pull in resolution; and begin

To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend,

That lies like truth

Perhaps Banquo was right after all – perhaps he should have questioned the real motivation behind those supernatural beings. But it’s too late. The tragedy of Macbeth is that his ambition has blinded him to everything; he had lost touch with his own failings and with humanity itself.

But, as usual, Shakespeare avoids giving us easy answers. Isn’t the brutality of kingship inevitable? Look at Richard III or Henry VIII, who could give many psychopaths a run for their money. Didn’t Elizabeth I (despite her denials) do away with Mary, Queen of Scots? Didn’t Henry VI die of ‘melancholia’ (i.e., murdered by Edward IV)? And what about the Scottish kings, such as Kenneth III (killed by rivals after he tried to change the rules of succession)? History is littered by bloody deeds carried out in the name of power. And old Duncan must go at some point, so that Scotland can renew itself with a vigorous young king.

When you think about it, the most frightening thing about Macbeth is not the ‘Secret, black, and midnight hags’ – it’s the amount of blood that has been shed by real rulers and would-be rulers across history.

---

Macbeth and Banquo encountering the witches, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland. 1577.

I wanted to add a postscript to this article to say that I recently acquired an edited version of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) which Shakespeare used as a source for Macbeth, and there’s some fascinating details in it.

For example, did you know that Holinshed tells us exactly where the witches come from, namely ‘a towne of Murrey land, called Fores’? Or Forres. Also, anyone who has seen the 1948 Orson Welles film of Macbeth might recall that it goes very heavily with the supernatural reading of the play, and that the witches are depicted melting a wax voodoo doll in a fire. I was surprised to discover that Welles probably got the idea from Holinshed:

Wherevpon learning by hir confession in what house in the towne it was where they [the witches] wrought their mischefous mysterie, he sent foorth souldiers about the middest of the night, who breaking into the house, found one of the witches rosting vpon a wooden broch an image of wax at the fier, resembling in each feature the kings person, made and deuised (as is to be thought) by craft and art of the diuell … for as the image did waste afore the fire, so did the bodie of the king breake foorth in sweat.

This detail is even more intriguing when you consider that Shakespeare conceived of Macbeth as a flattering entertainment for James I: the new king of England, who believed in witches and had published a book called Daemonology (1597). Before he came to the English throne in 1603, James VI of Scotland had been fearful of supernatural powers being used against him, especially as there was apparent proof in the actions of his mother’s third husband, Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell. The latter was a genuine threat to James because he had engaged in armed uprisings, but it was also believed that he practiced witchcraft, since a wax doll was conveniently discovered with the label: ‘This is King James the Sixth, ordained to be consumed at the instance of a nobleman, Francis, Earl of Bothwell’. This was enough for Bothwell to be arrested on charges of regicide and imprisoned in Edinbugh Castle.

It seems surprising, then, that Shakespeare did not use Holinshed’s report of the witches burning the King’s waxen image in Macbeth, but perhaps he felt it was tactless to do so. After his imprisonment in 1591, Bothwell escaped from the Castle and lived as a fugitive, occasionally pursued by James, and - after an astonishing series of escapades - finally forced himself into the King’s presence at the Palace of Holyrood, it is said, by hiding behind the tapestry in his bedchamber (did this episode inspire a similar one in Hamlet?) The King accepted Bothwell’s protestations of loyalty and, in 1593, he was finally aquitted of charges of witchcraft. However, some time afterwards, the King revoked his pardon, thus forcing Bothwell back into exile. Another formal sentence of treason was proclaimed and Bothwell continued to lurk menacingly in the shadows, finally fleeing to Naples, where he died in 1612.