Macbeth the Hero:

“Not in all the legions of horrid hell can come a devil more damn’d in evils to top Macbeth.”

A friend of mine once described a recent visit to a medium and a debate predictably raged over whether such ‘psychics’ were not an irritating waste of money.

However, I found myself wondering whether there lay a real danger in advice regarding the future. Might we somehow subconsciously act on such prophesy, thence to cry, “It’s just how they said it would be.”

Macbeth, on the surface, seems to do no more than that. As we would perhaps greet the promise of future fortune in a horoscope with, “Well, I’ll wait and see what happens”, only to become less accommodating to rivals in the office in the hope of gaining promotion, Macbeth tells himself, “If Chance may have me King, why, Chance may crown me, without my stir” only to find himself anxiously fulfilling the prophesy of his own volition.

Of course, what he needs is a wife of the same mind as his best mate, Banquo, to tell him not to be so daft and to throw whatever tabloid horoscope he’s been reading in the bin. Poor Macbeth. His wife, in fact, appears to have some supernatural hold on him. She’s unresistably seductive and we will tend to do the weirdest things for love and lust. If that wasn’t enough she throws doubt upon his manhood. Couple the two together, remembering she calls him coward, blasphemy to a soldier of Macbeth’s stature, and the temptation is too great.

Thus I do not believe it can be assumed that he will suffer “the deep damnation” of Duncan’s murder.
Nor is he entirely to blame for the deterioration of his marriage to a point where he can only greet news of his wife’s death with a hollow, “She should have died hereafter.” He loves her and she him but it is not a love to conquer all. It is a love based on need, as lovers often do feel they are most loved when they are needed.

I find it eminently possible that she might constantly demand he reiterate his love for her by placing him in positions where he really does need her strength. By the time we join them the only action left for which he does not have the strength is murder. When he refuses to be pushed on the matter she responds by telling him that his courage has turned green and pale and “Such I account thy love.” Such a state of affairs cannot last. When he is King what more need can he offer? She is no longer needed and, thus, no longer loved.

If we, for the sake of argument, indulge Macbeth so far, it is he himself that gives us the key to Macduff’s claim. Once King, he drinks wine expecting it to soothe away all his nightmares and finds it only gives him a migraine. By the time he’s obliterating Macduff and his family he really is “in blood stepp’d in so far” that to think of the atrocities he is committing could tear his head apart. Therefore, he chooses to blunder on through the fog and hope that it will clear. This is where Macbeth shows his true cowardice. He can confront everything but himself and there lies his downfall.

Macbeth has ultimately made a loving, fruitful life into a shell of tedium. He finds himself in a place where “Returning would be as tedious as go’er” and when he finally begins to wake up from his nightmare at the end of the play he describes what he has made of his life, “a walking shadow”. Unforgivably, the hero has made himself “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” and soon he will be “heard no more”. What a waste.

And yet I still rebel against the idea that he is beyond redemption. I think it would be difficult to argue any other but that he must accept responsibility for his actions, yet, I can’t help feeling that he’s somehow been earmarked for damnation and that this is not fair. And he does, it appears to me rediscover his heroism in his final battle. The prophesy has foretold that he is doomed now Burnam Wood has come to Dunsinane and he faces an understandably irate opponent who was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d. Yet, now he has the mettle to stand and fight the prophesy. He will die like a man in battle and grasp the last opportunity to find self-esteem and meaning to his life.

Poor Macbeth was an idiot to make so many bad choices. He lived his life “full of sound and fury” but ultimately it signified nothing.