Macbeth 3: Malcolm the hero?
The third in a series of essay on Macbeth. The first is on the crucial soliloquy ‘If it were done’, the second is on ‘The real Lady Macbeth’.
There are so many doubles in Macbeth, a play of ‘doubling’ and ‘troubling’, as the witches rhyme. During the course of this play two kings rule Scotland. The idea of kingship is crucial to the ‘cultural context’ of this play, and I am now going to look at two other kings of the play.
One of these, Edward of England, we do not see but we do hear of. The other is of course Malcolm, the man who takes over from Macbeth after the end of of the play, when he is crowned at Scone. He rids Scotland of its tyrant, and is the medicine of the sickly weal, and therefore might be considered the play’s ‘hero’ in the popular understanding of that concept. So this essay looks at the latter part of the story, including the scene set in England, and examines Malcolm and Macduff in particular.
Act IV scene iii is the only scene set outside Scotland, and is by far the longest scene in the play. Bear with me now briefly for some statistics (line counts depend on the edition of the play). I want to compare Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, to Hamlet, his longest (The Comedy of Errors is the shortest play). Macbeth is a play that is not only short, but has an extraordinary number of scenes considering its length.
So :
Macbeth has 28 scenes, with an average of 63 lines each.
Hamlet has just 20 scenes, with an average of 193 lines each.
Macbeth in total is 1755 lines long.
Hamlet is 3856 lines long (so Macbeth is just 45% the length of Hamlet).
The most dramatic and important scenes in Macbeth are extraordinarily short – the crucial I vii (the subject of the first of these essays) is just 82 lines long, and the amazing murder scene, II ii, just 74 of the most tense and brilliant lines ever written. All these staccato scenes are for a purpose: Shakespeare does know what he is doing. They enact the hectic headlong descent of Macbeth into moral horror, and of Scotland into chaotic violence, just as the leisurely stretched-out scenes of Hamlet enact the Prince’s uncertain meandering towards his purpose. Macbeth is all about speed, the way the central character desperately o’erleaps obstacles, the way he suppresses the pauser, reason, the way he tries to stop thinking so that he does not stop doing. When Macduff escapes his clutches by crossing the border to England, he says :
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook
Unless the deed go with it; from this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
·The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.
He is determined that from now on there will be no pause between thinking and doing. ‘It’ will be thought-and-done.
So why, given this wonderfully taut writing for the first three acts, does Shakespeare then write a scene of 240 lines, much of which seem repetitive, and which is dominated by a slightly tedious and definitely peculiar testing of Macduff? Act IV scene iii is, as I said earlier, the only scene set outside Scotland, and it comes almost as a pause in the action, a holiday from the grim intense darkness of the earlier scenes.
For a start, even the weather and the light seem different in England: the first line is Malcolm’s Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there / Weep our sad bosoms empty. So this is a place where there is so much light that you need to hunt for shade, whereas in Scotland darkness seems to hunt you down, a force for which we might borrow Milton’s famous paradoxical phrase from Paradise Lost, ‘darkness visible’.
Here at last are two of the possible ‘heroes’ of the play – the rightful heir, and a decent patriotic Thane who earlier made clear his distaste for and distrust of the new King, and who then went to England for help (at the expense of his own family’s lives). And in the end, between them, these two men do indeed serve the main functions of a ‘hero’: Macduff kills Macbeth, and Malcolm replaces him on the throne. Again, doubleness: in this play, it takes two to make a hero. Whether they feel like heroes to us is another matter.
Now to a paragraph from one of Tony Tanner’s superb introductions to the plays in Prefaces to Shakespeare :-
There is a strong Elizabethan feeling that virtue is associated with stillness (or slow, decorous movements) … Macbeth creates a fearful world in which all those under him or under his sway can only ‘float upon a wild and violent sea/ Each way and move.’ It is in the context of this vortex of violent motion created by Macbeth that one must understand the long, slow, seemingly pointlessly protracted scene between Macduff and Malcolm in England. As one critic very aptly describes it, ‘the scene is like a slow eddy on the edge of a swift current.’ As Malcolm explains, he cannot trust anything or anyone emerging from Macbeth’s darkened Scotland – ‘modest wisdom plucks me / From over-credulous haste.’ The play starts in ‘haste’ and seems to get ever vertiginously quicker. But here it is, laboriously, slowed down. The tide is beginning to turn.
As Tanner points out, the Malcolm we now get to know properly for the first time is very cautious, a man of modest wisdom, who hurries nothing. We’ve hardly known him until now – we saw him only briefly in Scotland previously, learning in I ii that he was in ‘captivity’ during the war – not much of an action hero then. Subsequently we saw him appointed Prince of Cumberland in I iv. Most importantly, we saw his reaction after his father was killed. In II iii it is left to Macduff and Banquo to express the most horror about the regicide while Malcolm only weakly replies to Macduff’s Your royal father’s murdered with O, by whom?, a single stunned phrase before he and his brother Donalbain decide to flee. He says Our safest way / Is to avoid the aim, and this caution or modest wisdom is all we know of him. Not exactly McSuperman.
Malcolm’s long testing of the unimaginative and eventually bewildered Macduff is, we might feel, only proper. We have had quite enough of someone who’s suppressed his pauser, reason, thank you very much. Malcolm pinpoints exactly what is wrong with Macbeth’s rule in his statement boundless intemperance in nature is a tyranny. And in his lines on kingship, he accurately sets out the king-becoming graces – Justice, Verity, temp’rance and so on (the third in that list harking back to the crucial idea of moderate balance in nature). We have every reason to believe that he will be a decent King: he is clearly patriotic and certainly not self-serving.
Let me turn for a moment to the fourth image of kingship we have in the play – the description of the English king Edward. He is described by the Lord in III vi as ‘most pious’ , and by Malcolm in IV iii as a man who cures the strangely-visited people who come to see him :-
How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures,
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers: and 'tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction. With this strange virtue,
He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy,
And sundry blessings hang about his throne,
That speak him full of grace.
So obviously he is the mirror opposite to Macbeth. If Edward is the ideal King, how will the Malcolm we are getting to know in IV iii measure up? Fintan O’Toole in his book Shakespeare is Hard, But So Is Life, is damning :-
Malcolm is the embodiment of the order that is to be restored, the play’s location of active goodness. But there is an enormous tension for anyone watching the play between what we know about Malcolm and what we feel about him, between what he says and the way he says it. We know that he is good, but we feel that he is boring. We agree with what he says, but wish he would either get on with it or say it with even a little of the poetic force Macbeth can manage. Morally, we are on his side, dramatically we are against him. We want him to win, but we don’t want to have to listen to him … Macbeth moves quickly and feels deeply; Malcolm moves slowly and has no capacity for deep feeling whatsoever.
As O’Toole suggests, in real life we would be on Malcolm’s side, warmly welcoming him as the medicine of the sickly weal, in the words of Caithness in V ii. But this is not real life; it is a drama and a tragedy, and as we listen to Malcolm’s bland and clichéd comforting of Macduff about the slaughter of the latter’s family, we are unlikely to feel our hearts lift. Question: Imagine Shakespeare had written a sequel to this play and it had just been rediscovered. How excited would you be in seeing it performed if you heard its title was Malcolm?
Act V scene ix is the final one of the play, in which Malcolm takes power. Now we are back to short scenes - just 41 lines in which to make us feel that the natural order has been restored. Here is Fintan O’Toole again:
this is almost an exact echo of Duncan’s speech near the beginning of the play when the earlier battle is concluded, the succession to the throne is settled, a traitor (Macdonwald) beheaded, rewards are promised and titles are given out. Malcolm speaks his last speech with a battle won, the succession to the throne settled, a traitor beheaded (Macduff has just come in with Macduff’s head) and in it he promises rewards and distributes titles. And we know what happened after Duncan’s speech – instead of being a prelude to peace, order and a smooth handing-on of the crown by Macbeth.
Does anyone in the audience join in that call of ‘Hail King of Scotland’? When the lights go up, do we all smile at each other in relief that everything has worked out all right in the end? The crucial importance of Malcolm in this play is not as a hero. There is only one character who constantly grabs our attention, and this is the key thing: Shakespeare does not present us with any figure who in the end distracts or detracts from him, not Lady Macbeth (who gradually fades from our attention, not the witches (their last scene is in Act 4), not the bluff decent Macduff (who actually kills Macbeth), and not the responsible, humane and in the end ordinary Malcolm. When we leave the theatre only one man is in our minds, and he is complex, poetic, imaginative, horrifying, murderous, tragic.