Controlling Life

Bill Long 7/16/05

Thoughts on I.1-I.3

We all know that we are subject to forces beyond our control, and that our life is influenced, shaped, defined and even determined at times by people and events that we didn't bring on ourselves. Yet we also embrace a philosophy that suggests we are the masters of our fate and captains of our souls. Both affirmations live in uneasy tension in the spacious or cramped quarters of our mental McMansions. A friend of mine, who received all kinds of awards and notoriety for being an outstanding college professor, confided to me once that he believed that people are basically "formed" by age 6 and that once they got to his classroom he was relatively powerless to affect their thinking. The irony is patent--a teacher most honored for his effect on students didn't believe in the very effect for which he was honored. Shakespeare explores the roiling uncertainty of who controls life throughout Macbeth, but the problem is evident already in 1.1-1.3. This essay explores at least three explanations of how life is controlled or understood, according to some of the characters in Macbeth.

Life According to the Weird Sisters/Witches

We are introduced to them and their evanescent and wind-swept lives when they are in the thunder and lightning of an open place (1.1), and then when they speak to Macbeth and Banquo on the heath (1.3). They influence life by harming people, but they also believe that there is no moral order in the universe. They harm the husband of a woman who won't give them chesnuts (1.3.1ff) simply out of spite. Like The Satan in Job 1-2, however, they are not given unlimited power--"Though his bark cannot be lost,/ Yet it shall be tempest-tost" (1.3.24-25). They disappear without a trace in a twinkling of an eye, like bubbles that pop as they rise in the air (1.3.79-80).

Yet somehow they know the truth about life, and greet Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor and King before he has attained either title. But this is all within a philosophy of moral confusion. Are there clear categories or is there a "moral order" in the universe for them? No, not at all. "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air" (1.1.11-12). As the notes in one version say, quoting a work from 1594: "every thing must bee interpreted backward as Witches say their Pater-noster, good being the character of bad, and bad of good." Thus, even though they see the future, and tell the truth about it, this truth is not such as would set one free, to quote Jesus, but is a complex, dark, grotesque, and twisted truth.

The Captain's Truth

The injured sergeant/captain gasps out his truth in epic style in 1.2. As men are in battailous array displayed, the emphasis is on Fortune who controls the engagement. Macdonwald was reinforced by the "Kerns and Gallowglasses." And it seemed that Fortune then would smile on the endeavor of the rebels. Fortune "Show'd like a rebel's whore," suggesting both the fickleness of that deity (a "whore"), but also the fact that she had decided to side for the nonce with the rebels. No reason is given for Fortune's smiling in this way--though the strength of the rebels is mentioned.

Macbeth's Controlling the Battle

Could it be, in fact, that the affairs of men rest in the hands of the strongest? That is the first impression we get upon meeting Macbeth. In fact Macbeth will be a man of immense psychological complexity as the play wears on, but at first we see him as a kind of killing machine of gargantuan energy and strength, cutting through the enemy lines like a scythe and killing the rebel leaders. Three instances of Macbeth's heroism are narrated in 1.2, though only the first two have a literary richness (which has led some scholars to suggest that the third killing--1.2.55ff.--is incomplete; a theory that I don't really buy). In the first, Macbeth is said to have "fac'd the slave" (the rebel Macdonwald) and then, without even having had the courtesy to insult him verbally, shake hands with him or bid him farewell, "unseam'd him from the nave to the chops,/ And fixed his head upon our battlements" (1.2.20-23). The poetry seems to lie behind some of the descriptions in Handel's Judas Maccabeus, where the hero Judas is said to have fought his way through the enemy forces and "met, fought, and vanquish'd all the rageful train." Then he comes, as conqueror, and "on his spear," he "bears the vaunter's head and hand,/ That threatened desolation to the land." Surely the vivid description of Macbeth's controlling the battle through his heroism seems to suggest that the affairs of humans are in human hands.

The second scene describing Macbeth's fighting prowess and strength reinforces this idea. When the rebel power resurges and threatens Macbeth again, he and Banquo fight "As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks" (1.2.37) and "Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe" (1.2.39)." While the Captain grows faint, he muses whether the two worthies were trying to "memorize another Golgotha" (1.2.41), or, in other words, memorialize or create the memory of another scene where Christ was crucified. So vast is the desolation wrought that only the freighted carnage at Calvary would equal it.

Conclusion

Thus we are left to ponder what indeed moves the affairs of men. Is it the fickle ways of the whore Fortune? Is it the strong ways of human killing machines? Or is history moved by nothing in particular, and are the categories we try to impose on the world simply that--categories which we call "fair" and "foul," but which are, indeed, in their essence, neither one nor the other? Job might say, "It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked" (Job 9:22), but the Weird Sisters don't go this far. In their world there just isn't any right or wrong, any moral value or order. Which will it be? We must read on...

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