Shakespeare’s Macbeth tells us that ambitions fulfilled through ignoble means fail to bring happiness
SOME human desires, like avarice, lust and power are essentially boundless and incapable of complete satisfaction. Animals are mostly content if they achieve a reasonable degree of security of their existence and ministration of their reproductive needs. With human beings the matter is different.
Though a great majority of men are obliged to work hard for a better part of their life to obtain their basic needs, some lucky ones whose livelihood is assured do not cease striving. Consciously or unconsciously, every man would like to be a king. Each person’s desire to achieve power is limited only by what imagination suggests as possible.
Human history is crammed with examples of men and women whose drive for power led them to believe that they were gods, goddesses, emperors — unequalled and unrivalled. Men’s limitless drive for power, however, is kept under control by another desire, ie, gregariousness. He likes to live amongst a group of his own hue and stripe. Thus, he is compelled to control his unbridled drive for power and anarchic self-assertion.
Love of power, though one of the strongest of human motives, is unevenly distributed and is limited by other motives, such as love of ease, pleasure, conformity, etc. We all strive to achieve power in one degree or the other, and in some form or the other. In some cases the desire to achieve power acquires an aberrant and bizarre character. William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, is the study of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s abnormal drive for power.
Shakespeare was born on April 1564, in a family of modest means. He received some education in the free grammar school at Stratford, but had to leave at the age of 13 as the family was facing serious financial problems. That is why the learned Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and a playwright in his own right, could laugh at Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek”. But, then, this is what a genius is all about. Shakespeare did not have much formal education and was not exposed to academic knowledge of psychology at all. But he understood human beings and their drives and motives with a consummate skill of a later-day professional psychologist.
The play deals with the overblown ambition of Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth. He is a close relative of King Duncan. While returning from a battle, which he won, he meets three witches who foretell him that he will be bestowed with a higher position than the one he currently holds and, a little later, he will become the king of Scotland. However, his son will not become the king. Instead, the son of his companion, Banquo, will. Soon, he was apprised of his upgradation to a higher position in the hierarchy. Thus the first prophecy of the witches came true, which gave rise to the swelling hope in him that their second prophecy may also come true. When he narrated these events to his wife, she forcefully advocated murder as a step absolutely necessary for the fulfilment of the prophecy. She rebuffed Macbeth’s reluctance and compunction at the thought of blood. Persuaded thus, Macbeth killed the king and Banquo in an effort of killing his sons. The sons, however, survived.
Macbeth tried to implicate the king’s attendants as the murderers, but suspicion still fell on him. The murdered king’s sons, fearing for their own lives, fled Scotland, leaving Macbeth as the only claimant to the throne. He became the king and the prediction of the witches literally came true. Macbeth’s guilt, however, did not allow him to have any peace of mind. He and lady Macbeth had their sleep afflicted with terrible dreams. They became subject of such dreadful fantasies as seeing the ghost of Banquo, noticing blood on their hands which could not be washed away and hearing voices portending disaster. Lady Macbeth died apparently of suicide and Macbeth was so desolate as to wish for death. He finally died in a battle waged on him by the murdered king’s son, Malcolm, who eventually became the king.
Macbeth is essentially a study of two persons’ ambition gone haywire. As noted earlier, having ambition within the limits of reality is normal. In case of Macbeth and his wife, it acquired pathological proportions. Ambition is a driving force responsible for the initiation, persistence, direction and vigour of goal-directed behaviour. It is not a primary drive like hunger or sex. It is an acquired one, called secondary drive, and does not have physiological basis. When it acquires an abnormal character, it is comparable to a mental disorder equivalent to anti-social personality disorder accompanying pathological lying, eccentricity, callousness, guilt or sometimes, lack of remorse. Let us examine how Shakespeare has depicted the pathological ambition of the two protagonists.
The witches prophesied three events: Macbeth will acquire a higher status; he will become the king and that his sons will not succeed him as kings. A sane and logical mind would either believe or disbelieve the prophecies. Banquo chose not to believe them and warned Macbeth against their lying equivocations. But once Macbeth decided to believe them, the logical course should have been to do so in all their manifestations, especially when it concerned the supernatural.
Both Macbeth and his wife thought that they could change fore-ordination. The psychological explanation of this reaction lies in what psychologists term as conflict, repression, and dissociation. When an event or a fact is out of harmony because of its intrinsically painful nature, a conflict arises between the two. The mind gets divided against itself.
This state of conflict gives rise to unpleasant emotional tension. This state of affairs cannot persist indefinitely. For the mental processes, it is a necessity that some solution is found out of this impasse. The logical mind will accept the incompatibility of the two, and would consciously decide to abandon the one in favour of the other. The abnormal mind, on the other hand, will repress the painful event. By this process of repression, unacceptable thoughts or events are banished from consciousness. This division of the mind into independent fragments, unaware of each other’s existence is called dissociation.
Now both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have banished the thought from their minds that if the two prophecies of the witches came true, the third one is also bound to be fulfilled. They try their utmost to kill the son of Banquo hoping in vain to stop him from becoming the king. Their abnormal state of mind led them to forget the logical chain of events. Shakespeare expressed it in the following words: “That memory, the warder of brain, shall be a fume ...”
The conscious conflict in the mind of Macbeth has been depicted in the form of his ambivalence and vacillation. Ambivalence has been defined as the coexistence in one person of two opposing emotions, desires, beliefs or behavioural tendencies directed towards the same goal. Lady Macbeth had convinced her husband that the murder of the king was absolutely necessary for him to become the king. He, however, was of the view that there were strong reasons against the deed. He was the king’s kinsman, the king was his guest, he had been a merciful king and the heavens would doubly revenge the death of such a person. But lady Macbeth convinced him of the indispensability of the action. After a great deal of vacillation, Macbeth killed the king.
To cover one murder, a murderer has to undertake many others. This is exactly what happened in Macbeth’s case. After murdering the king, he set about murdering Banquo, the wife, children and all the relatives of Macduff, the noble who joined the forces of Malcolm. All these murders were bound to give rise to a sense of guilt. Guilt is an emotional state produced by the knowledge that one has violated moral standards. In a sense it is self-administrated punishment. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were crestfallen and depressed. The first experience he had after murdering the king was to hear a voice which cried “Sleep no more: Macbeth doth murder sleep, the innocent sleep, that nourishes life.”
He became prone to many psychological problems including hallucinations, which are experiences similar to an actual perception but not resulting from stimulation of a sense organ, generally occurring because of psychological disorder. He saw the ghost of Banquo and bloodstains on his hand which would not vanish no matter how much he washed them. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” Macbeth says in a state of despair and anguish.
Logical thinking is the first casualty in an abnormal state of mind. The witches forecast Macbeth becoming the king. But they neither disclosed the timeframe for the fulfilment of their prophecy nor the process of achieving it. Adoption of murder as a means of its attainment was the decision of Macbeth and his wife. They never paused to contemplate that the kingship could come to them without they murdering the king, and thus saving themselves from the anguish which was the logical result of their dastardly deed.
Another illogical step taken by the two was to take the drastic action within days of hearing the prophecy. Sound judgment demanded that they bide their time, devise their plan taking into consideration all the pros and cons and then act. But abnormal ambition divested them of cogent thinking.
The play did not record any moment of happiness Macbeth or his wife experienced after they achieved their cherished dream of becoming king and queen. On the contrary, each waking hour was agony and sleep brought nightmares. The moral of the story is that an ambition fulfilled through ignoble means fails to bring happiness. Instead, it brings misery.
Faust sold his soul to the devil, but was doomed. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, too, lived a life of gloom and despair, and relief came only in the form of death. Macbeth’s speech on the death of Lady Macbeth sums up their abject existence:
