Macbeth's Rites of Violence

DEREK COHEN

Violence is the heart and soul of Macbeth. It permeates the action and the narrative; it clings tothe characters; it infects and controls the imagination of each of the personae. There is no respite,no real relief from violence in any tiny nook or large landscape of the drama. In many ways thisis Shakespeare's most hopeless play; no moment is free of danger and dread, while catastropheseems constantly imminent. Good news itself is tempered with anxiety. When the witches bringthe tidings of Macbeth's elevation to Thane of Cawdor, his body seems to act independently ofhis will. Macbeth informs his wife of the good things that have happened to him, and she seesonly a bloody staircase to the future. The sadness of the play is housed in Macbeth's teirible,passionate regret, itself the product of a violence that looms and lingers in the play; it never goesaway or gets less.

It is not idle to ask where the tragedy of the death of this murderer and tyrant lies. Why andhow do the panic and horror of the murderer-usurper affect us and appeal to our hearts? Hisdeath is presented and proclaimed as a release from tyrarmy and violence: we should rejoice in it.And yet even here, even with the death of the tyrant, a kind of tragic horror hovers like smokeover the ending of the play. Something infinitely precious has been lost in the mbble thatviolence has left behind. The presence of Macbeth's severed head at the end mocks the aura oftriumph with which the play concludes. Its message is mixed and contradictory: the tyrant isdead but violence thrives. The celebratory lines at the play's conclusion are thick with thesatisfactions that violence has brought and can bring. Seyward thrills at the news of his ownson's violent death and declares:

Had I as many sons as I have hairsI would not vwsh them to a fairer death.

(5.9. 14-5)'

The very manhood that Macbeth himself has extolled remains a potent reality as the play ends.There are no women in the final scenes. The drama has arrived at a world without them, a worldentirely under the control of men of violence in which women have no natural place. Suchwomen as Lady Macbeth who encourage violence are, ultimately, disabled by its chief byproduct- blood and corpses. Lady Macbeth is enfeebled by the similarity of Duncan's appearance to herfather's, and the recognition immobilizes her. Manhood is violence and its existence isinseparable from the bloody endeavours of men.

Violence is present in a multiplicity of forms in the play. Its point is always to deform andto dis-integrate whatever has achieved the shape of wholeness. That wholeness is, of course,always somewhat illusory since it is constantly subject to the destmctive force of violence.Wholeness and integrity, rather slippery forms in this play, are produced from disorder and can,as the drama keeps reminding us, descend back into the maelstrom. But it is illusions ofwholeness that beckon us into the fantasy of its existence. The theatre's most seductive illusionis the promise of a worid that works, a world in which things possess rightfril places and enjoysymbiotic relations to each other. But the world itself is a fragile place, made and unmade atwhim, by design and by accident. Where drama and the theatre are artificial in stmcture and canbe broken down and built up by the will of their creator or by his inadvertency, the world itself,on the other hand, is subject to larger forces that mock human will and desire. Violence is one of

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 23, 2011, 55-89DOI:http://dx/doi.org/10.4314/sisa.v23il.6

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the ways in which we come to recognize the existence of an engine that seems to drive theworld; violence is always nearby and thwarts us and changes us and drives us in directions wemay not wish to follow. Violence can break the things we cherish and destroy that which givesus hope and comfort. Its purpose is to fracture wholeness and obstmct expectation. Violence isthe enemy of human kind, but it is also man's most powerful instrument. It is the avatar oftragedy, a story of broken hopes; tragedy is inevitably a story of the contention against violenceby violence, a hopeless and paradoxical agon that never fails to repeat itself. Tragedy inexorablycarries us on a tide of violence to calamity. Part of what moves us in the play, what seizes oursympathies, is the parallel but invisible and untold story of great Macbeth's overwhelming lovefor his king and his wife.

There is no peace in the play. Lurking behind every scene, every dialogue, every fantasticappearance or event, is the spectre of violence with death following in its wake. Blood is thenormal product of violence. It is shed in great gouts in the drama; it is the one substance whosepresence possesses tangible reality. It can be touched, smelled, seen, and tasted. There is noargument about what blood is: it is only itself, and not a phantasm. Acts of violence arecommitted in order that blood be seen and smelt. The reek of blood is everywhere in the drama,

. the sight of it is common. We recognize that the primal energies of theplay, the forces that giyeit momentum and direction, are bent towards destmction. It has been noted that Duncan iscomplicit in the spreading violence, that his political stability depends upon acts of violence andthat he names these acts heroism.^ He is king by dint of the violent power at his command and herequires violent force to enable his continued possession of political authority. The first words hespeaks draw attention to his relation to blood, as he asks, "What bloody man is that?" (l.I.l)And abmptly he is positioned inside the circle of bloodshed and violence. Its outskirts, asBanquo is to find, are lonely and dangerous.

Blood is at the core of human cultures. It is a stable substance that is nevertheless fraughtwith conceptual ambiguity. On the one hand, blood is just that, just a substance that flows in andfrom the animal body. It is integrally bound up with the material realities of human life from itsvery incipience to its end. Blood, its ubiquity and its universal presence in human affairs,demand to be reckoned with. Cultures are not surprisingly very similar in their attitudes to blood.All cultures recognize the contradictory potency of blood in their customs and beliefs. Blood cansoil and blood can cleanse. It participates in the destruction and creation of life. It can bringdeath, misery, and disintegration, and it can bring joy, vitality, and spiritual health. Around theserealities human cultures have developed rituals and ceremonies that record the centrality ofblood in human affairs. When blood is encased in the skin where it belongs, social intercoursecan be harmonious: When it is seen on the outside of the skin it provokes reactions of varyingkinds and degrees. The sight of blood disturbs us and we seek a reason for its visible presence. Abloody nose, a bleeding shaving cut, these things disturb us momentarily; but they are soon takencare of. But blood as a product of acts of violence between or among human beings is not soeasily integrated into diumal existence. When blood issues from a wound made by violence, thedisturbance to our equilibrium can be profound. We are implicated in the disturbing presence ofblood. We are compelled to react to it. We may run from the sight of blood, or we may seek tostem its flow. Our manner of reacting to blood speaks to our very selves, helps to define who andwhat we are.

Blood, shed in an act of violence, has the power to shock and disgust us because we regardit as a contaminant carrying infection. At the sight of blood, most people pull the face of disgust,a universal and almost hard-wired human response to the presence of noxious substances, likeblood, flowing from the body. The face of disgust at the sight of blood expresses the attempt toward off the pollution that we believe blood carries. Blood is associated with a mysterious kindof filth that makes us recoil. When Duncan sees the bloody man, he sees blood before he sees theman. Because bloodshed and his so-called bloodline keep Duncan safely as king, he must regardblood as a benign substance. Duncan is protected in his position of sacred and secular authorityby the ideology of blood lineage. But visible blood is a badge of courage. The bloody man'sblood itself stands as confirmation of the courage of its bearer and demonstrates its power to

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inspire him to deeds of bravery in behalf of the king. But, the vulnerability of myths andsuperstitions that sustain and support royal lineage is central to the narrative. In the end, althoughDuncan's monarchy is perceived to be sacred by all his subjects, its mystery and sustainingmythologies cannot protect him from the violence of a mere murderer.

On the other hand, blood possesses mysterious powers of healing. So that while it maydisgust us, the context in which we apprehend it helps inform our reaction to it. The holy bloodof the lamb in Christian mythology endues the substance with sanctity and a powerfulconnection with renewal and rebirth. The blood of birth is blood whose mystery is mythologizedin human cultures. Blood is the material substance of the sacred oath; though sometimes redwine must stand for blood. The sight of Duncan's blood fills Macbeth, the recorder of his death,with a kind of terrible awe through whose agency the magnitude of the crime of his murder willalways take shape in Macbeth's thought and memory.

The physical instmment of murder is the dagger, while the sword is the instrument of war.The dagger, in its essence no more than a short pointed blade with a handle, pierces the skin andflesh of a victim. Unlike the sword, the dagger can be hidden on the person of its wielder andused surreptitiously. It is the weapon of secret violence, of plots and conspiracies. It and the clubare surely the most ancient - the original - instruments of violence. With his sword Macbeth"unseams" Macdonwald, eaming acclaim and praise for the magnitude and publicity of hisviolence; with his dagger he silently slaughters the king. It would seem that little ingenuity wasrequired for our earliest forebears to invent these tools of violence, although much ingenuity hasbeen expended in refining them over the ages; and evidently considerable skill is required forthem to be effectively employed in battle or in any kind of violent conflict. Still, their functionremains primitive and simple: to batter an enemy into submission or to pierce his body with asharpened point so that he submits or dies. All that is required is the will to power throughviolence and an acknowledgement of the intimacy of killing by knife. Macbeth's use of thedagger off the field of battle is remarkable and uncharacteristic for its sheer if inevitablecowardliness: he stabs three sleeping men to death. Part of his fragic agony is self-disgust at hisbetrayal of the warrior code to which he had been grafted. Having become a man who kills undercover of darkness, Macbeth can only plummet to new depths of befrayal and disgrace. Themassacre he commits in his own home brings him into new realms of violence and depravity.Macbeth has eradicated the boundary between rational violence and chaos. After the murder ofDuncan, there are no areas of safety left., The violence of warfare absolutely depends upon andrequires a rational context. Soldiers, the instruments of that violence, are sent into battle to dosufficient violence against their opposition to subdue them. Their success or failure is part of arational calculation by their masters.

Macbeth's use of violence is the measure of his depravity. It sinks, ever lower in its use oflies, subterfuge and subomation, acts that are necessary to his survival as moriarch. As Macbethseeks to distance himself from the acts of violence that define his reign, he remains nonethelessintegral to the evil that his murder of Duncan has unleashed. His ascent to the throne isannounced in a conversation between Macduff and Rosse: it has become fait accompli while theaudience is absorbing the implications of the death of Duncan. Macduff answers Rosse'ssuspicion that the vacated sovereignty will fall on Macbeth:

He is already nam'd, and gone to SconeTo be invested.

(2.4.31-2)

The sense of foreboding that descends upon the Scotland of the play is carried by hugger-muggerconversations like this one, and by Banquo's suspicious and fearftil soliloquy as he too tries tocome to terms with the new reality that has redefined the nation. Scotland has devolved from aputatively benignant monarchy to a nation govemed by the fear of violence. Banquo whispershis thoughts because whispering has become the normal currency of thought. From the sunshineof love, loyalty, and openness that seemed to surround Duncan to the dark and hidden world offear and violence of the nation mied by Macbeth.

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Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all.As the weird women promis'd, and, I fearThou play'dst most foully for't.

(3.1.1-3)

Scotland is cracking under the strain of the mle of the lawless monarch who holds terribledestmctive energy in his hands. It is now he who sets the pace, who determines who shall liveand who shall die as he feels the unsettling power of fear. He has made a throne for himself thatcan be secure only if he kills everyone who questions, seems to question, or may one dayquestion his entitlement and authority. Macbeth's descent into paranoia and moral madness isattributable to this realization - everyone opposed to him must be killed. The embrace ofviolence is sudden, total, and irreversible, though it was unexpected and unanticipated, there isno crime he will shy from in his determination to control his subjects. He realizes too late that hecannot confrol the thoughts of his subjects or their wishes and desires. When he realizes it, heonly redoubles his violence. He is caught by his own ambition, and almost as soon as he is kinghe knows that he is doomed. All thought and all action are driven by the principle of his survivaland fuelled by instinct. The use of violence has simplified his existence: he is king of Scotland orhe is dead. The occupation of the throne has clarified the ontology. He must choose to live or todie. Moral questions have lost their power to move or influence his actions. What it takes is whathe will do. The world is suddenly enlarged for him. He cannot kill everyone whom he distmstsor fears. Getting rid of Duncan was child's play compared to the difficulties that Duncan's deathpresents. Now he needs an army he can tmst and murderers upon whom he can rely. But animplicit element of the equation is what normally accompanies murder and violence - lies anddeception. There is dreadful logic to Macbeth's actions. Banquo and Fleance, suspected becausethey know too much, must be killed because killing is the way to resolve problems. Togetherthey threaten his present and future. Macbeth suboms men to kill them. Murder penetrates theexpansive landscapes beyond the site of the great regicide of the drama. The two hired murderersare among the most sinister minor characters in all of Shakespeare. The violence they bear intheir very faces both appeals to and repulses Macbeth.

Macbeth sees them as they are; men he should shun, yet he embraces them with a curiouscombination of insult and praise. To the First Mvirderer's statement, "We are men, myliege,"(3.1.90) Macbeth responds with a seething outburst of disgust:

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;As hounds, and greyhounds, mungrels, spaniels, curs,Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are diptAll by the names of dogs.

(91-4)

The world has become a place where manliness is apprehended as instinctual. Macbeth is not thesole author of the violence and mayhem in the world. This world has long been ready forMacbeth; it wanted only one big murder to transform the kingdom of Duncan into the kingdomof Macbeth: violence, as we have seen, was long present as a cmcial force. Macbeth's passage tothe throne should have been predictable. The saintly image of Duncan's body covered in blood,("his silver skin lac'd with his golden blood": 3.3.112) is wishful, a mark of Macbeth's self-hatred and remorse, harking back to a time forever lost.

Macbeth on the Scottish throne is a complex reality. How a dictator or tyrant occupies hisposition is only an expression of political dysfunction in the system that enabled his possessionof power. It is easiest to believe that Macbeth is so evil and so accomplished in villainy that he isthe sole and autonomous author of his rise to the pinnacle of power. But there is more to thispicture. Macbeth as usurper opens a great gaping hole in the politics that have made possible hisrise to absolute authority. He has seen and acted on the realization that the crown could be seizedand that, in other words, Duncan's occupation and possession of Scotland's throne is almostentirely contingent on his command of the instmments of violence with which he is surrounded.

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Duncan, for all the apparent benignity of his reign, is dependent upon violent force to keep hispower, as his constant guard of men with swords reminds us. The throne Macbeth takes isalready compromised by its dependency on violence for its existence. Duncan, no less thanMacbeth, needs to be able to command violent force in order to hold onto power. The valiantCawdor, opponent of Duncan, makes the same rational calculation that Macbeth makes later: thecrown belongs to him who can seize it. Duncan is the central political figure in a system inwhich subversion, adequately managed, can he rewarded hy a crown. It is a simple.Machiavellian calculation depending only on the subject's possessing the desire to steal, hyviolent force, the power of the present occupant of the throne. Cawdor's tireachery, successfullyreprised by Macbeth, makes rational sense.

The crown, whose wearers come and go, endures while it is sustained by men of violence.They roam free in the land of Duncan: that he needs to rest his authority on such men is the fatalflaw of his monarchy. Men in this world are praised and rewarded for their acts of violence.They need, however, to know the parameters of that violence. They are taught to slaughter eachother without mercy, but they must be loyal to the most powerful of their cohorts - usuaUy theking. The crown beckons: its possession offers huge power to its wearer. To keep it stablerequires careful use of that power; it must seem to be worth preserving for the use of a singleman who must seem worthy of support. Those who support the king need a reason for theirloyalty, and that has to he accounted for by more than their patriotism or love of their leader.Duncan's power includes the ancient practice of gift-giving and reward. To keep his side solidand strong, Duncan must placate and please his powerful friends. In recognizing this fact of hisreign, Duncan tacitly acknowledges political realities that transcend the homages to honour andvalour. His gift to Macbeth of the thaneship of Cawdor is more complex than the apparentreward for valour in which it is cloaked. It is that, indeed. But it is also a bone cast at the feet ofa hungry dog. Macbeth must be rewarded because he is potentially dangerous to the king. His

.power, valour, reputation, and skill remain under Duncan's control: his loyalty needs to bebought. In granting Macbeth the title of Thane of Cawdor, Duncan is also shoring up his ownpower while adding to Macbeth's. The throne is only secure while it is protected by men ofviolence who remain loyal to its occupant. But loyalty, as the narrative of the valiant Thane ofCawdor reveals, needs to be watered and fed. In other words, as Duncan fully recognizes, loyaltycan he bought and, once it has become identified as a commodity, its existence as a transcendentmoral value is compromised.

Long before its friability is discovered, the Scottish throne is in danger. The malevolentmagic of the witches, assembled in the fraught atmosphere of thunder, lightning, and rain carriesa message of peril and unpredictability. The "fair is foul"(1.1.9) incantation points to troubleahead, to a time and place where inversion mies and all bets are off In such a world killing aking seems almost in the nature of things; violence is in the air and the witches are its dealers.The first scene has the powerful authority inherent to first scenes: whatever happens after theopening develops out of it and is shaped by it. The witches are an integral part of whateverfollows. Nothing wholly normal can ever happen in the world of this drama; everything istainted by the malign pretematural. The reign of Duncan is doomed: and that first scene is ourwaming. The witches can never be removed from the equation: their imprimatur is on everysegment of the play. While Macbeth seems to act autonomously, he has seen the witches andthey have infected him with a slow poison. They have a transformative effect on what he doesand how he thinks. The infection takes instantly and enters his hloodsti-eam. The witches bringdark thoughts into heing and give flesh to the forbidden and unacknowledged demons of theunconscious from which no one is free. Companions of violence, the witches bring therealization of its effects into being. The dominant characteristic of time in this play is the time ofnow; immediacy mies Macbeth's imagination. He clamours for the sudden and the quick result.Imagination ceases to be limited by thought and words but demands to be given shape andactuality. The time of waiting is over, natural processes must be forced into rapid being andviolence is the means:

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I am bent to know .-By the worst means, the worst.

(3.4.133-34)

Though we associate Macbeth with terrible violence, the first time we actually see him engagedin violent action is at the end of the play in the battle of Dunsinane where he wields a mighty andheroic sword. Before now, we have been treated to a diet of descriptions of Macbeth's acts ofviolence: they are many and varied, from slaughter on the field to the assassination of a sleepingking. He tmly is the man of blood of the drama, with unmatched prowess in bloodletting.Shedding the blood of another human being is a practice incorporated into the play withoutreference to morality or ethics. It is done by "good" and "bad" characters alike. Violence simplyis. It is an instmment of inevitable use in the acquisition and maintenance of power. There areclearly occasions when violence is used in bad or good causes, but the play distributes itsmoments of violence without favour. There is no such thing, in other words, as good or badviolence - only good or bad "people" who use violence to gain their ends. But the play possessesno attitude towards the violence itself. It is a fact of life implicit in almost every consequentialaction. The character of Macbeth inhabits every moment of the play: he is the restless anddestmctive spirit who fills the conscious world of the play. He is invoked, remembered, andfeared.

Those who watch and read Macbeth are drawn into this iron circle of amorality. We areforced into an acceptance of the tmisms about violence being proven tme before our very eyes:violence breeds violence and violence can be effectively countered only with more and greaterviolence. We are drawn into a world that, like our own, unquestioningly accepts the inevitabilityof violence as a tool of govemment and authority. And it is the case that throughout recordedhistory power has typically been measured and demonstrated by the level of access to theinstruments of violence enjoyed by those who would govem. We accept, even in democraticsocieties, that the govemment must have the means to employ violence against those whothreaten it from within or without. Duncan relies on the ready proximity of the tools of violenceno less than Macbeth does when he is king. Goveming without these tools is unthinkable. Theplay represents violence as a means both to military and political conquest and as a means ofexpression. Each character demands to be read in his or her relation to violence. The action takesplace in a world that is well past the testing moment when characters choose to use or not to useviolence to enforce their wills on others. It is a given of the play that violence is a necessary andubiquitous force in this social formation. Every man in the play is armed with a sword or dagger,knows what its primary use is, and shows himself unreluctant to put it to that use.

The violence of men has unexpected consequences. It can awaken the souls of killers. Thedeceptions and pretences practiced by Macbeth give to the inhabitants of his world the comfortof a simple understanding. Good and evil, in their minds, exist in altemate and separableuniverses. The murder of the king carries a blinding moral clarity with it. It is an evil deed: it isthe opposite of a good deed. It inspires and intimidates the men who surround Macbeth; itspresence as a fact and idea in the Scotland of the play makes things happen. The action of thedrama circulates around the murder of Duncan and the minds of the characters are besieged by it.But it is only Macbeth who feels its full force. And this is not only because he is its perpetrator.Macbeth is bequeathed a mind that will not release hold of the contradictions and confusions thatthis murder brings about, a mind that has the capacity to contain contradiction. He is unable torelease hold of the implications of his deeds, and instead he embraces and scmtinizes his ownconsciousness. Macbeth is exceptional in this regard. The world he inhabits possesses for all butMacbeth a simple moral clarity. The characters see it in black and white: they live in a worldwhere moral choices are straightforward, where good and evil are identifiable values. Themurder of Duncan imposes terrible new responsibilities on his murderer. Macbeth needs to leamto negotiate the relationship between power and violence, to lead Scotland rationally whilesimultaneously dealing with the volcanic motions that have taken possession of his mind. Tomaintain the deception by which he is sustained, Macbeth needs to act or perform. The tension

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of acting inside these fraught circumstances requires that Macbeth express tmth and falsehoodsimultaneously. He is king by an act of violent treachery, but he is also king in fact.

Macbeth's report of the discovery of Duncan's body is one of the great tmth/lies of theplay. His mouth is full of lies and hypocrisy, yet he is simultaneously speaking tmth about hisanguish. He succeeds in holding onto the ambiguity of his situation by virtue, it appears, of analmost inconceivable pain. This is not a moment of politic lying so much as a profession of thetraumatic discovery of the self that has betrayed the self that would be tme and loyal. The grief isas real as the lie that enfolds it:

Who can be wise, amaz'd, temp'rate and furious.Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.The expedition of my violent loveOutrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,His silver skin lac'd with his golden blood.And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in natureFor ruin's wasteful entrance; there, the murtherers.Steep'd in the colors of their trade, their daggersUnmannerly breech'd with gore. Who could refrain,

• That had a heart to love, and in that heartCourage to make's love known

(2.3.107-16)

We are never allowed to see Duncan dead. All we have to rely on is the word of witnesses to thecamage. Macbeth's report is the one that sticks in our minds. Its focus is the blood that virtuallysacralizes Duncan while it simultaneously degrades and soils the guards. Blood, the paradoxicalsymbol of both life and death, stands as well for Macbeth's intention and his violent design.Blood can carry the deepest affirmation of the values of a culture, and it can be the most profaneof all human substances. Blood can sanctify and it can soil. It can elevate and degrade.Macbeth's words capture the contradiction: Duncan's blood confers divinity upon Duncan, whilethe same blood marks his putative killers with a filthy witness to their deeds.

Macbeth is the self-appointed messenger to the waiting group of Duncan's subjects. Hetakes it upon himself to deliver and manipulate the narrative of Duncan's demise. On one level,this speech is a piece of dreadñil hypocrisy, a narrative designed to conceal the narrator's terribleand violent crime. Macbeth tells his hearers how he came to kill the guards protecting the king,and challenges them to say that they would have done differently: "Who can be wise, amazed,temp'rate and ftarious, / Loyal and neutral in a moment? No man." Any of you, in other words,would have done the same. He could not stay his hand, he tells them, to obey "the pauser,reason." It is, despite its dishonesty, almost impossible to resist the burgeoning feeling lyingbehind the narrative. While the speech is a piece of arch manipulation, it positively rings withsincerity. Macbeth seems to believe the tmth of the words he knows to be lies. He places thescene with the precision of a director - "Here lay Duncan" ... "there the murderers" - and thewords of a master narrator. When he describes the dead body of the beloved king - "His silverskin laced with his golden blood" - he takes his hearers to a world outside the one they inhabit tothe early modem world of religious iconography. The image of Duncan and the suggestivecolours with which Macbeth paints him possess irresistible conviction. The image lifts Duncanfrom the realm of the real into a virtually sanctified place, recognizable as belonging to medievalsacred painting, where the power of the image is, paradoxically, driven by its stasis. HereShakespeare yields the triumphant and energetic early modem style to the quieter, but no lessmoving, two-dimensionality of the medieval painterly style in order to achieve the effect ofspiritual majesty. This is Duncan's apotheosis, his removal from the earthly to the heavenly, andit gives us a Macbeth in the throes of awe, frilly alert to the magnitude of the moment and theenormity of his crime. This single line, in the middle of the speech supplies the image uponwhich the force of the speech depends, and it captures, as no other reference to Duncan, the fullforce of the storm about to descend on Scotland. It is an exquisitely painterly image of violence

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in stasis, a characteristic of medieval art. Duncan lay still, Macbeth reports, surrounded bytokens and signs of violent murder, blood, and bodies. The silver and gold of his skin and bloodlend him an aura of unearthly holiness to which even - or especially - Macbeth succumbs.Duncan's skin is "lac'd" with blood, says Macbeth; the word suggests an artistically contrivedpattem, ineffably inscribing violence and violation on the king's sacred body. Macbeth's grieffor the dead king is not feigned when he utters these luminous and beautiful words. They comefrom a heart broken by remorse and consciousness. The memory of Duncan's bleeding body thatsuffuses this speech fixes itself in this image of golden blood and silver skin and clings toMacbeth's mind. As a way, perhaps, of separating himself from the murder of Duncan and theguards, Macbeth includes himself only once in the narrative: he talks of "my violent love"without otherwise including himself in the description of the spectacle of violent death.

The violence of Macbeth threatens to empt out of control, and the opening scenes do muchto set in motion the play's depiction of a world in the throes of uncontrollable energies ofdestmction. The witches, the battle scenes, and the excitement supplied by violence lend animpression of a world in which chaos and chaotic violence are the mle. By contrast, Macbeth'sreport of the scene of Duncan's death possesses a kind of orderliness: it situates the scene in aframe that has a moral and aesthetic surround. However, once Macbeth is king, the violenceseems to descend into a maelstrom of bottomless disorder. The.inurder of the farnily of Macduffcauses a tilt away from expediency and reason into a forcefield of moral and aesthetic panic. Theestablished rituals of military violence and the rational claims of ambition get cmshed by thedesperate need of the usurper to buttress his achievements in bloodshed. There is no crime toolarge for him, nothing at which he will flinch. But, while Macbeth ignores the rational andimmerses himself in the dubious attractions of slaughter and mayhem, the play pulls in anopposite direction. Violence, I have argued, is formalized and controlled by ritual. And this playdiscovers form and shape through the marriage of ritual with its most violent moments. Thus,despite the power of chaos and the undoubted efficacy of chaotic violence, the pull of ritualizedpractice in acts of violence will not be denied.

Primal cultural forms assert themselves in obedience to ritual, by which the force of chaosis kept in check. Rituals of violence in Macbeth start with the witches, whose incantatory spellsand charms surround the wild outer reaches of the play's world. Inside these limits the rituals ofviolence and blood practised by the protagonist belong more strictly to the world of socialpraxis. Having done the deed, Macbeth retums to his lady, stained with the king's blood. Hishands, the agents of his crime, expose his guilt; washing them will remove visible evidence ofthe crime. The blood, his lady reminds him, is a "filthy witness"(2.2.44) to the murder. Macbethrejects the ritual of washing as unequal to the task his crime has set. Lady Macbeth believes thatthe crime and guilt can be washed away with water: "A little water clear us of this deed; / Howeasy is it then!"(2.2.64-5). Macbeth's larger imagination recognizes that the blood upon him canstain the "multitudinous seas."(2.2.59) The ritual of cleansing, of washing the guilty soul clean ispractised in most cultures. It is intended to counteract the violence of the original crime. Water,the source of life, is the great mother capable of renewing life, assuaging pain and guilt, andcleansing sin - especially sins of violence that have threatened the cohesion of the socialformation that they serve. The ritual of washing away moral and actual dirt and blood with alittle water retums us to the idea of the finitude of violence and its effects. Blood that canincamardine the ocean cannot be washed away. The murder of Duncan franscends ordinaryhorror; its effects are more than a filthy witness: on the confrary, it enlarges the tide of blood setin motion by the pretematural murder at the centre of the play. While Lady Macbeth still dwellsin the world of the natural and the ordinary, Macbeth exists in a world in which the normalunderstandings of time and place no longer apply; his world is unhinged and no rituals aresufficient to restore it.

But the play is larger than its protagonist. Macbeth's mind ranges desperately. His vastimagination is given impetus by his consciousness. He who understands better than anyone whatit means to kill a man is drawn into a kind of addiction to murder upon which he begins torecognize his whole security rests. He must kill to stay alive. The wild beasts that prowl across

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the lens of his vision bring powerfully to life the equation of Scotland to a new kind of hellwhere the new mle that applies is no mle at all. Macbeth, however, is cursed with a memory,that most human of traits. And it is memory that keeps drawing him away from total victory.This is the greatest of all dramas of remorse, and remorse is not possible without memory.Within the wreckage, Macbeth's memory helps to displace the violence by which he lives and tosubstitute the inherent order that memory supplies. Memory provides Macbeth with the tmesense of what he has lost, of what his violence has cost him. It is memory that gives his fantasiesform and shapes the deep and terrible sadness that he comes to feel as he approaches his momentof reckoning. He measures what should have been against what is; the condign rewards of agood life against those of a life devoted to ambition and dealing death:

And that which should accompany old age.As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,I must not look to have; but in their stead.Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breathWhich the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.

(5.3.24-8)

Macbeth remembers not just the things he has lost, but the moral world he has forfeited by hisviolence. The speech recalls a world in which values of love and friendship make age palatable.Its depiction of the world he currently inhabits is bitter and disappointed.

In this speech Macbeth guides us to the tragic centre of the drama of his existence where hefeels the overwhelming presence of loss, the tme heart of tragedy. Violence itself is intimatelyrelated to loss and is driven, among other things, by the deliberate intention of inflicting the painof loss on an adversary. Macbeth is an ironic victim of his own propensity for violence: hisintention from the moment he thinks of killing Duncan is to keep violence outside himself, toafflict those who threaten his position with loss upon loss until they are incapable of respondingin kind to his treatment. But violence produces sometimes equal and always opposite effects, andMacbeth finds himself in the middle of a tidal wave of blood and death that he himself has set inmotion. And it drowns him.

NOTES

1. All quotations from Macbeth are from The Riverside Shakespeare: Second Edition, ed. BlakemoreEvans with J.J.M. Tobin (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

2. See Derek Cohen, Shakespeare's Culture of Violence (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993),p. 127.

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