It shows how our community can be haunted by monsters, both internal and external, human and supernatural.
It shows how our community can be haunted by monsters, both internal and external, human and supernatural.
O ctober is the month for frights. We dress up for Halloween in spooky costumes. We decorate our houses with scary monsters.
Our current politics seems frightening, too.
The midterm elections loom in early November. Many fear the repercussions of losing to the opposing candidate or party, talking of political opponents as if they were ghouls.
Politics, however, has rarely been scarier than as portrayed in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare constructs a particularly prescient political horror story. The play takes place in Scotland, where the title character rises to the throne through combinations of fortune and murder. He then maintains his kingship by ever-bloodier means until he is deposed and killed via the very sort of violence he used to assume power.
The play forces its viewers to confront two deeply unsettling political issues. First, Macbeth displays the depths of wickedness to which humans will descend to fulfill their ambitions. Macbeth kills the rightful king, Duncan, while the monarch sleeps as a guest in Macbeth’s home. He knows he owes a duty to protect the king, both as a subject and as one of Duncan’s relatives. He admits, “Duncan / Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels” against his killing. Only Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” drives him toward the dastardly deed.
In cahoots with Macbeth is his wife, Lady Macbeth. The Lady worries that her husband’s “nature . . . is too full o’ the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly, / That wouldst thou holily.” Lady Macbeth sees ambition as fully realized only through committing evil deeds. Without a willingness to shed holiness and embrace ill, one’s desires will remain, at least partly, unfulfilled.
To maintain the throne captured by murder, the Macbeths continue their killing spree. Macbeth has his best friend, Banquo, murdered and tries to kill the man’s son, Fleance, in an attempt to prevent Banquo’s descendants from seizing the throne upon Macbeth’s death.
Horrifyingly, Macbeth even extends his destruction to women and children.
Macbeth is warned to fear the nobleman Macduff, who absconds to England to help organize an invading army to combat the tyrant. Macbeth sends murderers to eliminate Macduff’s family remaining in Scotland. In one of Shakespeare’s most chilling scenes, the son of Lady Macduff is killed before her eyes while the killers chase her off stage to her cry of “Murder!”
These scenes bear witness to the malevolent face of ambition taking over the human heart. It’s an ambition so corrupt, unrelenting, and increasingly vicious that it leads to tyranny — a ruler acting not for the common good but willing to destroy anyone to satiate his desires.
Second, the play makes us face the possibility of sinister, supernatural forces influencing — if not directing — our political crises. The play opens, not with ordinary human characters, but with witches. These foul fiends speak of their plans to intrude into human affairs, particularly through meeting Macbeth. Only after we see these women engaged in their supernatural activities and hear their plan does the play then turn to the human world. This world of Scotland already suffers from evil and turmoil. Macbeth and Banquo rise in prominence by putting down a traitorous rebellion against Duncan, which is recounted in the play but not displayed. The witches then meet Macbeth and Banquo, giving them prophecies of future success, including that Macbeth will be king and that Banquo’s progeny will ascend to the throne as well.
These prophecies stoke Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s own ambitions, goading them to murder. The witches thereby guide Scotland’s descent into tyranny and destruction, giving later advice to Macbeth to “be bloody, bold, and resolute.” Macbeth dutifully follows this counsel, adding arrogance to his murders and a sense of godlike invincibility that contributes to his own violent demise.
In another haunting scene, Lady Macbeth prays to evil spirits in preparation for hatching and executing the killing of Duncan. In that prayer, she asks those sinister elements to “unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty.” One may read this prayer as Lady Macbeth’s request to be possessed by demonic forces. Those forces give her the world — the kingdom of Scotland — in exchange for her soul. Only when those forces have used her to the fullest do they discharge her by her own suicide.
We live in times that either deny the supernatural or relegate it to irrelevant or entirely benign status. Christian theology speaks of resisting the temptations of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We can recognize the temptations of the flesh and the world, seen in this play as personal ambition and the influence of one’s spouse. Macbeth, in true horror fashion, confronts us with more: the possibility that forces beyond our sight and understanding manipulate our own vices to the ill of ourselves personally and politically. Behind the tyranny of the political is tyranny over the human mind and heart.
There is hope amid the ruins of Macbeth. We see in Malcolm, Duncan’s son, a man with the wisdom to know justice, the perception to see the vice in others, and the virtue to desire the good.
The play ends with him on the throne, restoring order and justice to Scotland. And yet, the horror remains both unconquered and unflinchingly close.
The witches are alive and active. Fleance, the son of Banquo, is somewhere offstage, promised the throne by the witches’ prophecy, and likely an object of the witches’ influence going forward. Scotland is not safe from the same source of horrors it just escaped.
This Halloween, we can find much to scare us. In Macbeth, we see how those frights truly extend to the political realm. It is a political horror story that shows how our community can be haunted by monsters, both internal and external, human and supernatural.