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The Impossible Liberty of Macbeth / An Analysis of THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH by Shakespeare

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THE IMPOSSIBLE LIBERTY OF MACBETH

by Joseph Suglia

 

“Hitler’s hands trembled.  He stooped.  He stared fixedly.  His eyes had a tendency to bulge and were dull and lusterless.  There were red spots on his cheeks.  He was more excitable than ever.  When angered, he lost all self-control.”

—General Heinz Guderian on Adolf Hitler shortly after the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad

 

“Hitler wakes at night with convulsive shrieks.  He shouts for help.  He sits on the edge of his bed, as if unable to stir.  He shakes with fear, making the whole bed vibrate.  He shouts confused, totally unintelligible phrases.  He gasps, as if imagining himself to be suffocating…  Hitler stands swaying in his room, looking wildly about him.”

—Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks

 

Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth signifies nothing if it does not signify the absence of the freedom of the will.[i]  Macbeth is not free, and his commitment to evil is not a self-chosen commitment.  And if Macbeth’s commitment to evil is involuntary, and surely it is, could he even be said to be evil?  Macbeth overpowers his reluctance to kill the King of Scotland only with difficulty, much in the way that Brutus only with difficulty overcomes his reluctance to kill Julius Caesar.  Surely, no one would call Brutus “evil.”  Why, then, should anyone characterize Macbeth as “evil”?  Perhaps because one thinks of Macbeth as someone who kills for power, whereas one thinks of Brutus as someone who kills in order to prevent power from growing tyrannical.  After killing Duncan, the King of Scotland, Macbeth finds himself entangled in an ever-enmeshing net.  He is impelled to kill and kill again in order to maintain the role in which he finds himself.  Macbeth does not abrogate any responsibility, as some commentators claim.  Macbeth has no responsibility.  He is blameless from the beginning of this rapidly escalatory play until the end, a play that accelerates toward its terminus without allowing the spectator or reader to catch one’s breath.

 

WHERE IT WAS, THERE I SHALL BE

Macbeth has a moral feeling for his king.  He recognizes Duncan’s decency, acknowledges with gratitude that he owes his newly anointed title of Thane of Cawdor entirely to Duncan.  Duncan lavishes praise on Macbeth, and Macbeth appears grateful for this praise.

After he kills his beloved King, Macbeth is rattled by spasms at night and by paroxysms during the day.  He is nauseated by what he did.  He is aghast at the murder that his hands committed, sickened by the deaths that he suborns.[ii]

It is an “air-drawn dagger” [III:iv] that leads Macbeth to regicide.  Led on by the floating dagger—a phosphorescent dagger in Polanski’s cinematic interpretation—Macbeth is entrained to Duncan’s bedchamber where he will murder the King and his sleepy grooms, the King’s minions, the chamberlains.  The dagger which virtualizes before him spouts blood from itself.  It is as if the metal itself contained blood vessels, blood vessels that are venesected.  The dagger is ascribed human agency and a kind of moral responsibility that is denied to Macbeth.  The handle of the dagger beckons to him: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” [II:i].  It is the dagger which commands Macbeth to kill, it is the dagger which seems to marshal Macbeth: “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going, / And such an instrument I was to use” [Ibid.].  It is not the user who wields the instrument; it is the instrument which wields the user.

The hand that takes precedence over the mind, in this play; the doing takes precedence over the doer.  Practice supersedes the practitioner; usage supersedes the user.  “What hands are here?” [II:ii], Macbeth asks in wonderment.  It is as if his own hands were disembodied, self-sufficient, and self-active:

The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see [I:iv].

“Wink at,” here, means “not to see.”  Translation: “Let the eye not see what the hand does (i.e. murder Duncan), but let the hand do what the eye is afraid of looking at.”  The hands are performing the action, which is disconnected from Macbeth’s consciousness (metonymically represented by the eye).  It is not that Macbeth is exculpating himself, not that he is absolving himself of blame, but that, the play is suggesting, he is blameless to begin with.  His own hands seem to belong to a strange executioner, not to himself.  They are not his hands, but “these hangman’s hands” [II:ii].  “Go, get some water / And wash this filthy witness from your hands” [Ibid.]: When Lady Macbeth, who thinks that guilt can be abluted away with water, utters these words, she is ignoring the stranger thought that Macbeth is fundamentally guiltless.  The dagger is doing the work, the hand is performing the action, not the I.

Hence, the play’s superabundant proliferation of hands and deeds and doings and dids:

“Hand,” “hands,” or “-handed” appears in the text thirty-seven times.

“Deed,” “deeds,” “indeed,” or “undeeded” appears in the text twenty-four times.

“Do,” “doth,” “doing,” “dost,” “done,” or “does” appears in the text 142 times.

“Did” and “didst” appear in the text forty times.

Macbeth vows (to Lady Macbeth) to kill the King: “I go, and it is done” [II:i].  He does not say, “I go to do the deed.”  The “It” supersedes the “I.”  The “It” is acting, not the “I.”[iii]  The subject is not the one who intends to do something; the action is asubjective.  The actions that are performed by Macbeth are done without the intervention of his subjective will.

Shakespeare’s play suggests the opposite: that deeds are done without a doer.  There is only a pure doing without a self.  “To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself” [II:ii], Macbeth says after the deed is done.[iv]  This experience of self-estrangement is the reversal of the Delphic injunction to “Know thyself!”  The deed is depersonalized, as if the deed were done by someone else, someone other than Macbeth.  The idea to kill Duncan is someone else’s thought:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man
That function is smothered in surmise,
And nothing is, but what is not [I:iii].

Macbeth is suggesting that it is not he who is thinking of murder; his thought has a life of its own.  He is seized by a thought that is disembodied, by a thought that shakes his individuated humanity, his “single state of man.”  The thought in his brain has supremacy over him; he does not have supremacy over this thought.  He is gripped by the thought and dominated by it.  The paradox that “nothing is, but what is not” means that absence is phenomenalized and presence turns into absence.  Nothing is (reality disappears) but what is not (the hallucinatory nightmarishness, the terrifying hallucination of the dagger).

It is as if Macbeth’s actions were governed by thoughts that have been transplanted into his mind: “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, / Which must be acted, ere they may be scanned.”  To translate: “Thoughts that are not my own shall be translated into actions (‘will to hand,’ ‘must be acted’) before I will become conscious of them.”

The disembodiment of the deed from the doer: Such is the reason that all of Macbeth’s direct killings are invisible, occurring offstage, before the final act.  We do not see the killing of Duncan, and the killing of Banquo and the killing of Macduff’s wife and children are performed by mercenaries.  The effect upon the spectator or reader, whether “intentional” or “unintentional,” is that s/he will be unlikely to judge the character of Macbeth from a moral point of view.  Shakespeare is subtly exculpating Macbeth, emancipating him from responsibility, liberating him from liberty.

 

THE HERMAPHRODITIC TERRORIST CELL

Macbeth encounters on the heath three women who will tell him his future.  In Holinshed, Shakespeare’s sole primary source for the play, the women of the heath are either the weïrd sisters or “nymphs of feiries.”  In Shakespeare, the three women are certainly the weïrd sisters.

Weird is the favorite insult of the unintelligent-insecure and is usually applied to anyone who falls too far outside of the common herd (“You are, like, sooooooooo weiiiiiird…”).  Most English-language users have forgotten that weird originally meant “magical” and “relating to fate or destiny.”  To be “weird” etymologically means to be “fated,” to be drifting away from one’s self-chosen path by the compulsions of fate.  It is derived from the Old English word for “fate,” which is wyrd.  Scottish writers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries used the phrase werd sisteris to describe the Fates of Ancient Greek mythology, those female divinities who determine our futures.  The phrase werd sisteris can be found in The Asloan Manuscript, an anthology of Scottish prose and verse that was assembled by John Asloan.  “The weird sisters” always means “The Fates.”  Shakespeare’s witches are the forces of fate, of moira.  To translate Holinshed into contemporary English, they are “the goddesses of destiny, imbued with the knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science because everything came to pass as they had spoken.”[v]  Everything came to pass as they had spoken: By speaking of events in the future, they bring those very things about.  The weïrd sisters generate the events that they foretell.[vi]

Macbeth is deeply impressed by the witches’ soothsaying, by their fortunetelling.  The witches make oracular pronouncements—Macbeth will become the Thane of Cawdor, no longer the Thane of Glamis, and then the King of Scotland.  Macbeth will remain childless, Banquo will be prolific and generate an entire dynasty.  Banquo shall “[b]ring forth men-children only…  Nothing but males” [I:vii].  Banquo’s children “shall be kings” [I:iii].  Banquo will be progenitive, producing a lineage.  He shall be “[l]esser than Macbeth, and greater… Not so happy [as Macbeth], yet much happier” [Ibid.].  In other words: Macbeth will become King, but he will not become a progenitive King.  Macbeth will become King, but he will spawn no Kings.  The witches’ oracular pronouncements impel Macbeth to kill Duncan and, later, Macduff and to suborn the murders of Banquo and Macduff’s wife and children.  Both Banquo and Macduff are generative.  Macbeth and Macduff have similar names because Macduff is the double of Macbeth.[vii]  As if to suggest what?  Macbeth is barren—as Macduff says, “He has no children” [IV:iii]—but he has no problem suborning the murder of Macduff’s children.  He has no problem slaughtering the children of his double for he bears no children of his own.  Macbeth is the sterile double of Macduff, Macduff is the fertile double of Macbeth.  Childless Macbeth kills off his child-producing double Macduff, as childed Macduff will assassinate his infertile double Macbeth.  All of this was set in motion by the witches’ prophecy that Macbeth will have no sons and Banquo will be generative of a dynasty (the Roman Catholic, French-sympathizing dynasty of the Stuarts).  The regicide of Duncan—as well as the murders that were designed to cover up that regicide—was propelled by the oraculizations of the weïrd sisters.  The witches do more than read Macbeth’s future; their “great prediction[s]” [I:iii], their “prophetic greeting[s]” [Ibid.], their fatidic pronouncements create his future.  The epicene witches prophesy Macbeth’s coronation—but this prophecy means that the future has already occurred.

Notice that the first thing that Macbeth says in the play, his opening statement, is a resaying, is the mindless repetition of what the weïrd sisters have said already: Macbeth’s observation “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” [I:iii] is an echoing of the witches’ earlier paradoxical statement “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” [I:i].[viii]  Macbeth is will-less—even “his” language ventriloquizes the language of those who marionette him.  This does not mean that there is a hidden sympathism or synchronicity between the witches and Macbeth.  It means that Macbeth’s words are not his own, his desires are not his own.  His mind, as his language, is molded, shaped, formed by the witches.

In his unfadable essay on the play, “Notes on Macbeth,” Coleridge describes the weïrd sisters as “the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature—elemental avengers without sex or kin.”  Elemental avengers, indeed: The weïrd sisters are pettily revengeful and use the elements of nature to exact their revenge.  Coleridge is right on that point.

One example of the witches’ petty revengefulness: A sailor’s wife refuses to give in to the demand of the First Witch—to give the witch the chestnuts on which she is munching.  To exact revenge on the woman, the first Witch intends to journey in a sieve to the ship in which her sailor husband is sailing and savage, ravage, and ravish him.  The First Witch makes the threat: “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do” [I:iii].[ix]  When she declares her intention to do, to do, to do, the First Witch is likely alluding to a violent sexual appropriation.  She is probably alluding to a taboo-yet-common sex act.  It is likely that the First Witch intends to perform fellatio upon the sailor husband of the chestnut-hoarding woman.  “I’ll drain him dry as hay” [Ibid.], the First Witch threatens, referring to the sailor husband.  She intends, it seems, to sap, to drain the sailor dry with her skinny-lipped mouth.[x]

Terroristic ventilators, the witches summon winds.  They summon winds to hammer their enemies and to propel the First Witch on her raping adventure.[xi]  The Second Witch proposes whipping up a wind to drive the First Witch’s sieve: “I’ll give thee a wind” [I:iii].  The Third Witch seconds the offer: “And I another” [Ibid.].  Though the witches admit that they cannot wreck the sailor’s craft, The Tiger (pointing to a gap in the witches’ prepotency), they can, they claim, hammer the vessel with their conjured winds.[xii]

We see the witches tumbling umbles into their hellish cauldron while incanting a malevolent spell.  They boil and bake exotic-market animals that could easily spawn a novel Coronavirus—a Filet o’ Snake, the eye of a newt, the toe of a frog, the wool of a bat, the tongue of a dog, the forked tongue of an adder, a slowworm, the leg of a lizard, the wing of an owlet [IV:i].  Throw in a civet and a pangolin, and you will have a zoonotic plague far worse than COVID-19.  Assuming that the witches are brewing beasts for malicious purposes, they are biological terrorists, as well.

However, Coleridge is wrong when he writes that the witches are sexless—“without sex or kin.”  When Macbeth asks, “[W]hat are you?” [I:iii] it is almost as if he were asking, “What sex are you?” or “What gender are you?” or “What are your pronouns?”  The answer appears to be that the witches belong to no determinate sex or gender at all.  The witches are gynandromorphic, showing both feminine and masculine traits.  Each of the witches “lays” a “choppy finger… [u]pon her skinny lips” [Ibid.].  The choppy finger is a phalliform figure, the lips are obviously figural of the feminine.  Macbeth to the witches: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” [Ibid.].  The witches are not sexless; each has a double sex.

The wizardesses are chaos agents.  They form a hermaphroditic terrorist cell that projects its gales against Macbeth, who is borne by its winds.

The witches prophesize Macbeth’s downfall by speaking through the Three Apparitions.  I will ascribe the prophetic remarks to the weïrd sisters for the purposes of convenience.

The weïrd sisters issue literal statements, and Macbeth will metaphorize them.  Macbeth metaphorizes literal statements, wrongly believing taking such statements literally would be the literalizing of metaphors.  The witches literally mean that the forest of Birnam will be deforested and reforested.  They are not speaking in hyperbole.  The witches’ statement is ambiguous only because it is straightforward—Macbeth reads the statement as hyperbole, not as a literal assertion, much as he hyperbolizes their other statement that only a man not of woman born could slaughter him (I will return to this point below).  Macbeth believes that he is safe in Dunsinane only because the witches have told him that only the deforestation and reforestation of Birnam Wood would undo him.  The witches through the Third Apparition: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him” [IV:i].  Immured in his fortress, Macbeth assumes, falsely, that mobile trees are not things that could ever exist.

When they say through the Second Apparition that “none of woman born / [s]hall harm Macbeth” [IV:i], the witches intend the statement literally.  They mean that Macbeth’s killer will have been birthed by way of a Caesarian operation.  They are saying that Macbeth’s slaughterer will not have come from a birth canal; they are not intending that Macduff’s genesis was without the intervention of a mother.

Because Macduff never was expelled from a birth canal, he is able to send Macbeth down the death canal.

The emphasis, then, should be placed not upon “woman,” but upon “born.”  Macduff did indeed come from a woman; however, he was not born from a woman.  He was “from his mother’s womb / [u]ntimely ripped” [V:viii].  Macduff was from woman born, just not naturally born.  It is likely that the juggling fields know well that Macbeth will accentuate the word “woman” and not the word “born.”  And yet they mean what they say!  The weïrd sisters are not liars—everything that they say is the literal truth.  The point is that the weïrd sisters know that their words will be misinterpreted.  They make plain statements that they know will be interpreted ambiguously.

Fascinating “juggling fields… [t]hat palter with us in a double sense” [V:viii]!  The weïrd sisters make clear, literal statements, which Macbeth then either interprets metaphorically or places the emphasis on the wrong word in the sentence, thus distorting its meaning.[xiii]  Of course, it is likely that the juggling fiends know what they are doing: They know the tendency of human beings to overinterpret or to falsely embellish literal statements.  The trick of language of the weïrd sisters is not that it is opaque—the trick is that their language is limpidly transparent.

The witches have tricked Macbeth with the equivocality of their speech.  Their speech is equivocal because it means precisely what it says.  Such is the diabolism, such is the mummery of the triad of wizardesses.  Language is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing unequivocal.[xiv]

 

THE UNSEXED AND RESEXED LADY MACBETH

Lest this be thought of as Shakespearean misogyny or gynophobia, let us consider the textual evidence that neither the weïrd sisters nor Lady Macbeth is female.  Lady Macbeth desexualizes herself, and the weïrd sisters, again, are hermaphroditic to begin with.

Lady Macbeth is only given one sentence in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577), the source from which Shakespeare derived the lineaments of The Tragedy of Macbeth.  She is described merely as a woman who is “burning in unquenchable desire” to become the Queen of Scotland and who therefore urges her husband to kill the King.[xv]  Shakespeare incarnates her character considerably by disincarnating her character: In Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth desexualizes and resexualizes herself.  “[U]nsex me here,” she says to the “spirits / [t]hat tend on mortal thoughts” [I:v].  Defeminize me, in other words, and then masculate me—manify me by making “thick my blood” [Ibid.].  I don’t know how the preternaturally prescient Shakespeare knew this, but it is a scientifically demonstrated fact that men do, indeed, have more red blood cells and hemoglobin than women do, on average.  As Freud observes, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is “prepared to sacrifice even her womanliness to her murderous intentions, without considering what a crucial role that womanliness must play once it comes to defending the position achieved by criminal means, the goal of her ambition.”  One might object to Freud’s “essentialism”—perhaps Freud did believe in a factitious “essence of womanhood”—but this does not negate the basic point that Lady Macbeth expresses the desire to sacrifice her womanliness, expresses the desire for her own defeminization.  Whether the sacrifice of her womanliness is the reason that she falters as a wife beginning in the first scene of the fifth act of the play depends on the reader or spectator and one’s projective preconceptions.

The role that Lady Macbeth plays in the murder of Duncan is phantasmically illuminated in the painting of Henry Fuseli, who translated the text into German while a student in Switzerland (Fuseli spent his adult life in Great Britain).  Despite its title, Fuseli’s painting Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812) does not actually show Lady Macbeth seizing the daggers with which her husband has killed the King of Scotland.  Phantasmal, seething with rage, the new Queen is lunging at her reedy, blanched, wraith-like husband, demanding that he hide the instruments of the crime.  Fuseli knew that it is the weïrd sisters and Lady Macbeth who propel the action of the play, not Macbeth.  In Holinshed, Macbeth and Banquo collude and murder Duncan; in Shakespeare, Macbeth allies himself only with his wife.  In both Holinshed and Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth is the impeller, the propellant of the play’s epitasis.  The idea to murder Duncan, to commit regicide, is Lady Macbeth’s, not her husband’s.  She is the impulse behind the regicidal decision, which, in turn, leads to more and more killing.

Lady Macbeth arranges the killing of the King.  She says to her husband:

…you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch,
Which shall to all our nights and days to come,
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom [I:v].

“Dispatch” here means “management.”  Translation: “You shall, my husband, let me govern tonight’s event (the killing of the King)—an event that shall dominate all of our nights and days in the future.”[xvi]

When her husband expresses reservations about killing the man who promoted him, who made him Thane of Cawdor, Lady Macbeth calls her husband, in essence, a sissy: “When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more than the man” [I:vii].  In other words: “You will not become a man unless you kill the King; otherwise, you will remain a boy, perhaps a ladyboy.  And if you do it, then you will be more than just a man.”  Any hesitancy on Macbeth’s part is written off as weakness: Macbeth’s spasms, his paroxysms, his anxieties would “well become / [a] woman’s story at a winter’s fire / [a]uthorized by her grandam” [III:iv].  She is here taunting, assaulting his masculinity, undermining the presumption of his manliness.  “Are you a man?” [Ibid.], she asks him, rhetorically, after the deed is done.  She belittles her husband by questioning his masculinity, infantilizing Macbeth, for he is indeed the child of Lady Macbeth.  Lady Macbeth mothers—produces—her own husband, who would only become a man by doing her bidding.  Lady Macbeth says of her husband’s face:

Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters… [I:v].

This is an ambiguous statement.  What, precisely, does Lady Macbeth mean by strange?  Lady Macbeth might mean that her husband’s face is expressive—men may read strange matters therein.  “Strange” would mean “unsettling,” “grotesque,” “horrific.”  Men may read eerie, disturbing things in her husband’s face, things that are on Macbeth’s mind, things that should remain hidden.  Or she might mean that Macbeth’s face shows things that are foreign to his cast of mind.  “Strange,” then, would mean “alien,” “foreign,” “incommensurate,” not part of him, outside of his consciousness.  In other words, men may read things in Macbeth’s face that Macbeth is not actually thinking.  Macbeth’s face, then, would be inexpressive.  The fundamental point, for my argument, is that Lady Macbeth acts as the official interpreter of the book of Macbeth’s face.[xvii]

Despite all of her aggressiveness, so guilt-afflicted is Lady Macbeth post-deed that she becomes vegetabilized and then takes her life.  After the suicide of his wife, Macbeth does what any husband would do in the same situation.  He philosophizes.  He philosophizes in a sequence of metaleptic substitutions: “Life” becomes a “brief candle,” which becomes a “walking shadow,” which becomes a “poor player,” which becomes “a tale / [t]old by an idiot, full of sound and fury / [s]ignifying nothing” [V:v].  Metalepsis, in the rhetorical sense, is the substitution of one metonym for another.  Here is my own example: “That is not the mole hill that I wish to die on,” which synthesizes two metonyms, “That is not the hill that I wish to die on” and “Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.”

Childless Macbeth is as a child to Lady Macbeth.  I see Macbeth’s childlessness as an abdication of the parently role and as the continuation of childlikeness.  Unable to procreate, he is infantilized.  For Macbeth is indeed a child—he is powerless, which in the deepest sense is what a child is.  He is buffeted by windy forces (the witches, Lady Macbeth) that he cannot harness.

 

INTIMATE DECAPITATIONS

The Tragedy of Macbeth ultimately concerns the spasms of tyrannomania, the psychopathogy of the tyrant.  And is Macbeth not a precursor of Adolf Hitler?  The most frightening thing about Hitler is that he was humanly human.[xviii]  I mean to suggest: Hitler was likely the worst human being who ever lived—and yet he was a human being!  He was nervously neurotic and neurotically nervous.  He took amphetamines to bring himself up and depressants to bring himself down.  He suffered from insomnia and panic attacks.  Anyone who reads the 1943 Office of Strategic Services-commissioned report on the psychology of Hitler will infer inductively that the German tyrant was a self-hating, insecure weakling and neurotic—and his self-hatred was, of course, legitimate.  The case study fertilizes my suspicion that all tyrants undergo paroxysms of paranoia; they are all neurotics.  The play of Shakespeare evokes the neuroticism of tyranny and the discomforting thought that all wrongdoers are the sufferers of illnesses.

Macbeth is not the only character who is not in control of what s/he does.  Commentators of the play have seldom given sufficient attention to Malcolm, perhaps the most woman-obsessed erotomaniac in the whole of Shakespeare—even more libertine than Lucio of Measure for Measure.  Malcolm is a lickerish lecher.  It is Malcolm who says that his wantonness is fathomless: “[T]here’s no bottom, none, / In my voluptuousness” [IV:iii].  It is Malcolm who suggests that husbands should keep their wives, daughters, matrons, and maids far away from him and from his carnal desires: “Your wives, your daughters, / Your matrons and your maids could not fill up / The cistern of my lust” [Ibid.].  The lechery, the lickerishness, of Malcolm implies that he has no free will, no way of controlling his erotic impulses and therefore should never be raised to the sovereign of Scotland.  I bring this up because Macbeth, much like Malcolm (yet another character whose name begins with the letters M and A), similarly has no control over his impulses.  He is no more his own creation than is Macbeth.  Both are docile, trained and entrained.

The play begins with a decapitation (that of Macdonald) and ends with a decapitation (that of Macbeth), suggesting that the actions that we assign to subjects are acephalic actions.  Macdonald’s “head is fixed upon [the Scottish army’s] battlements” [I:ii], and Macduff “enter[s]… with Macbeth’s head” [V:ix].  Not fortuitously, the First Apparition is a disembodied, weaponized head [IV:i], foretelling the coming beheading of Macbeth.  Decapitation is the key to understanding The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Roman Polanski’s 1971 cinematic interpretation of the play culminates in a spectacular decapitation.  I am filled with shuddering admiration for the hallucinatory lugubriousness of Polanski’s film, which is indeed a great Roman Polanski film.  However, it has to be stated: Polanski’s Macbeth is a magnificent work of cinema that has absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare.

In his magisterial Daybreak: Thoughts on Moral Prejudices, Nietzsche sees in Macbeth a vigorous, daemonically attractive figure who is appealing because of his impassioned commitment to evil.  Nietzsche cosmeticizes Macbeth as a hero-villain or a villain-hero (without using these terms).

Instead of regarding Macbeth as a villain-hero or an anti-hero, as he often is, I see Macbeth as a process and the recipient of forces that are constantly acting upon him.  If there is no free will, and both the tragedies of Hamlet and Macbeth suggest that there is none, there are neither villains nor even heroes, even in time of plague.  Nor is there such a thing as a Self that would be the changeless center of consciousness, as if the subject were the captain of a ship—in charge of the deeds that the body does.  The play suggests that human beings are not self-conscious agents but fleshly puppets or “walking shadow[s]” [V:v].[xix]  Drivenness is what marks Macbeth—he is not an auto-mobile, not a self-driven vehicle.  He is being driven.

Immediately after the suicide of his wife, Macbeth acknowledges that life of the human species is temporary.  He acknowledges that the life of the human animal is nothing more than a “poor player” who “struts and frets his hour upon a stage” [V:v].  He acknowledges that human life is a “brief candle” [Ibid.] that flares up only to be extinguished.  Macbeth assumes finitude and refuses finitude at the same time.  He assumes mortality and refuses mortality.  When he says, “At least we’ll die with harness on our back” [Ibid.], Macbeth appears to be suggesting that he does not have a speckle of a scintilla of a modicum of a tincture of a jot of a hope of surviving yet rushes headlong to his death and oblivion.  He appears to be suggesting: Even though we know that we are going to die, even though we know that we are going to be forgotten (we are hurtling toward oblivion, which is forgottenness), “[a]t least we’ll die with harness on our back” [Ibid.].  This great, triumphal statement is an assertion of the human in the face of nothingness.

The play suggests that all actions are involuntary, that everything is necessary.[xx]  Macbeth is provoked to murder involuntarily, by forces beyond his control, in the same way that alcohol involuntarily provokes nose-painting, sleep, and urine [II:iii].  The acceptance of necessity is determinism, as is the short-lived stoical resignation of Lady Macbeth: “What’s done is done” [III:ii], and “What’s done, cannot be undone” [V:i].  Yes, and what will have been done will have been done.

There is no redemption or forgiveness or apology at the end of the play, only an impassioned refusal and assumption of necessity, a fighting-in-vain against necessity unto the end, “with harness on our back.”  The Tragedy of Macbeth is, relevantly, Shakespeare’s briefest tragedy.  As if to remind us of the ephemerality of life, the play itself is ephemeral.  Time is all-annihilating, the life of humankind is a “brief candle,” and Macbeth is an agent of all-annihilating time.

Macbeth would infuriate time’s whiteness, time’s blankness.

 

Joseph Suglia

 

[i] Date of composition: 1606, terminus post quem.

 

[ii] Macbeth is not equal to the deed that he has committed (the murder of Duncan).

 

[iii] Macbeth is deploying a similar distancing technique when he says, “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” [I:vii].  Note that he does not say, “If I were to do it.”  The “It” takes the place of the “I.”

 

[iv] It would be unpresumptuous to say that this experience is not one of self-knowledge, but one of self-misknowledge.

 

[v] The original text of Holinshed: “These women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken.”

 

[vi] Appearances of the supernatural or of aberrant nature protrude and obtrude throughout the text of the play—a mousing owl hawking and killing a towering falcon, two horses cannibalizing each other [II:iv], the banqueting ghost of Banquo [III:iv], the apparitions of an armed head, a bloody child, and a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, the show of eight kings [IV:i].

 

[vii] Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Macduff, and Macdonald are the four Big Macs.  Banquo is The Whopper which is served at the banquet.  The names of the Big Macs are similar, fortuitously, for these are the names given in the historical record (Holinshed).  There are instances of parechesis throughout the play: “banquet” and “Banquo,” “thane” and “thine,” as well as “Macbeth,” “Macduff,” and “Macdonald.”

 

[viii] The weïrd sisters often speak in paradoxes: “Greater than Macbeth, and lesser”; “When the battle’s lost, and won” [I:i].  Macbeth, whose speech imitates the speech of the witches, also occasionally speaks paradoxically: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good” [I:iii].  Malcolm, too, is paradoxical when he says: “We have met with foes / That strike beside us” [V:vii].  He might mean: “We have encountered enemies who are on our side,” perhaps alluding to the kerns (Irish guerilla soldiers), against whom the Scots fought at the beginning of the play and who might now be Scottish allies.  The entire play contains a paradoxology.

 

[ix] “I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do” gives the illusion of subjectivity.

 

[x] “I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do” is what rhetoricians call “epizeuxis”: the repetition of a word in close succession.  Epizeuxis is the least intelligent form of rhetorical repetition, but it would be unfair to blame Shakespeare for this, since the repetition is purposely mindless.  Perhaps the clearest example of epizeuxis: “No, no, no, no.”

 

[xi] Macbeth to the witches: “[Y]ou untie the winds and let them fight / Against the churches…” [IV:i].

 

[xii] “Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” [I:iii].

 

[xiii] To think that words only have a metaphorical significance is to have a slender understanding of how words work.

 

[xiv] Babbling language, signifying nothing—language is a text in which the signifier supersedes the signified.

 

[xv] The original text of Holinshed: “The woords of the thrée weird sisters… greatlie incouraged him herevunto [to kill Duncan], but speciallie his wife lay sore vpon him to attempt the thing, as she that was verie ambitious, burning in vnquenchable desire to beare the name of a quéene.”

 

[xvi] And she continues: “To alter favour ever is to fear. / Leave all the rest to me” [I:v].

 

[xvii] What Lady Macbeth is saying sounds uncannily resemblant of what King Duncan says in the fourth scene of the first act: “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.”  He is alluding to the traitorous quondam Thane of Cawdor.  In a masterly feat of Shakespearean cosmic irony, the King then turns to speak to someone he misestimates: Macbeth!

 

[xviii] To clarify my argument: Arguably the evilest organism ever to have lived is Adolf Hitler.  And yet he was all-too-human, with his night sweats, with his paroxysmal fevers, with his aesthetic and sexual impotencies, with his neuroticisms, with his dreads.  Macbeth and Hitler are/were human.

 

[xix] The play subtly weakens the idea that a human being could be autogenously produced; it criticizes the myth of autogeny.  That idea is blown up into flinders.  To use the language of psychology: The play suggests that the formation of the human being could be explained by alloplasticity, not autoplasticity.  Not by the mind’s capacity for dealing with the external world, but by the mind’s capacity for being affected by the external world.

 

[xx] The play humanizes the tyrant Macbeth.  He is impelled, necessitated to kill.

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On KING LEAR (Shakespeare) | I DON’T THINK YOU’RE READY FOR THIS VILE JELLY: ON KING LEAR (Shakespeare)

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I DON’T THINK YOU’RE READY FOR THIS VILE JELLY: ON KING LEAR (Shakespeare)

by Joseph Suglia

 

“One has not observed life very carefully if one has failed to see the hand that gently—kills.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Paragraph 69

 

“Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits.  If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.”

—Martin Amis, “Philip Larkin: His Work and Life”

 

Any writer who has received a Letter of Rejection knows the sting of malignancy behind that letter’s boilerplate politeness: “Every month, we are sent thousands of manuscripts for review.  Unfortunately, your manuscript was not among the few that reached our editorial board.  We will keep your query on file should another opportunity arise.”  Any suitor whose desires have been refused knows the malicious assertion of power that surges and throbs behind the superficially gentle refusal, so unkind in its apparent kindness: “Thank you.  I am very flattered; unfortunately, I am not available for dating.”  When American corporatists say, “I am sorry that you feel that way,” this means: “I don’t care how you feel.”  When Disney employees cheep and chirp, “Have a Disney Day!” to tourists, this is another way of saying, “Kill yourself!”

Such is what Slavoj Žižek calls the “unmistakable dimension of humiliating brutality” inherent to polite responses (In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 17).  Politeness is ambiguous because it seems to be a form of gallantry and respect for the other person’s feelings; just as often, it conceals a radical disregard for a person’s sensitivity.  Open expressions of dislike must be avoided in polite society; therefore, one’s contempt for others maintains itself as disguised contempt.  Respectfulness and tact are, often enough, screens behind which disrespectfulness and insensitivity lurk.  There is, in a word, such a thing as aggressive politeness; there is such a thing as being aggressively polite.

I believe that the ambiguity of politeness is evident in Shakespeare’s traumatizing King Lear (1605-1606).  Let me be blunt: The play concerns a king who is thrown down to the level of a homeless beggar, and he is subjected to a series of brutal humiliations throughout the play, as are Edgar, Gloucester, and Lear’s rough yet loyal-to-the-death servant Kent.  The abjections begin long before the King’s exposure to the cold gusts of the open heath.  Lear is humiliated long before he experiences undisguised elder abuse, long before he is pushed out of doors, long before he is diminished to an undignified poverty.  The degradations begin with the manifest politeness of his two eldest offspring, Goneril and Regan.  Lear is mapping out and parceling out his kingly estate—prematurely, I would add—to his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, before his “[u]nburdened crawl toward death” [I:i].  His crawl toward death turns out to be a severely burdened one, despite his expectations.  His decision to give away his land, property, and revenue is an undiscerning one—hence the ocular imagery that spreads throughout the play.  The gruesome enucleation of Gloucester in Act Three: Scene Seven, for instance, mirrors Lear’s own blindness, his inability to leer.  The play’s twin metaphors are blindness and nothingness.[i]

When Lear asks his youngest daughter, his favorite, to declare her love for him, Cordelia’s response is monstrously inappropriate: “Nothing, my lord” [I:i].  (Inappropriate yet not as cruel as the pointed flatteries of Goneril and Regan, which I will turn to below.)  Inexpressive Cordelia says this to herself, and so we know that it is genuine: “I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue” [Ibid.].  She knows that language always lies, she knows that any word that she could possibly say would belie the love that she has for her father, transmuting her feelings to their converse,[ii] so she chooses to say nothing: “Nothing, my lord.”  She utters the following to explain her mutism: “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” [Ibid.]—“to heave” means “to lift.”  She cannot raise the profundity of her feeling to language, with all of its manifold evasions, pomposities, and solecisms.  Undiscerning Lear misses Cordelia’s meaning: All Cordelia is suggesting is that she loves her father according to a wordless obligation.  She is “[s]o young” and “true” [Ibid.]—and Lear, dotard that he is, mistakes his youngest daughter’s brazenness and refusal to dote on him for disloyalty.[iii]

Again, Lear’s successive humiliations begin not with Cordelia’s inadvertent insult, but with the politeness of Goneril and Regan.  Cordelia, the malapert minx, with her saucy bluntness, is kinder than Goneril and Regan, who are empty flatterers and who are cruel in their flattery.  Politeness and manners are cruelty.  Goneril and Regan are followers of the conventions of the court; their intimacy is a kind of formalized intimacy or a kind of intimate formality.  One of Goneril’s inflated flatteries goes thus: “Sir, I do love you more than word can wield the matter…” [Ibid.].[iv]  Undiscerning Lear, who “jointly” “invests” his eldest daughters with his “power” [I:i][v] trusts their statements—statements that are no more meaningful than the proposition “Banana trees eat cheese.”

Cordelia’s resistance is nothing in comparison with Goneril and Regan’s insubordination, for they undermine their father’s standing and resources before pushing him out into the cold of the storm.[vi]  The point that I am trying to make is that Cordelia’s resistance, however inapposite it might be, is far less destabilizing than the savage overthrows of her older sisters, who wear the mask of politeness.

Lear is a literalist.  He literalizes Cordelia’s impoliteness, as if it represented disloyalty, when it does not.  He literalizes Kent’s bluntness, his “unmannerliness,” his “plainness” [I:i], as if it represented rebelliousness, which it does not.  Instead, he prizes Goneril and Regan’s “oily” and “glib” [I:i] flatteries, which conceal a deep and deadly disobedience.  To repurpose something once said by George Carlin, their version of politeness is contempt pretending to be manners.

The King’s demand is for the expression of love, as if the expression of love were love itself.[vii]  Lear prefers expressions of politeness to genuine loyalty.  He believes that Goneril and Regan love him because they say that they do.  When he finally grasps the venom with which their polite formulae is saturated, Lear makes the logical error of associating the inhuman behavior of Goneril and Regan with the behavior of all women.  Lear becomes a full-blown misogynist on account of this logical error (the Fallacy of Composition), which is similar to the unfortunate mistake of some critics who think that the play is misogynistic because the character Lear blindly becomes a misogynist.[viii]

Lear’s absolute authority at the beginning of the play is gradually triturated.  Contemptuously, Oswald refers to the King as “My lady’s father” [I:iv].  “My lady’s father” places the emphasis on the “lady” (Goneril) and thus suggests the unmanning of Lear.  Everyone in the hall knows this nasty bit of pseudo-politeness for what it is: an insult to the King.  Kent accordingly gives Oswald a good drubbing—Kent, who is blunt and painful in his honesty yet far, far kinder than those flatterers, those sycophants, those sophists, whose loyalties lie in their mouths and not in their deeds.

The eldest daughters are the cuckoos that bite the head off the hedge-sparrow, their father.  The Fool to Lear: “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long / That it’s had it head bit off by it young” [I:iv].  The most shocking thing about the second line is the intentional absence of proper grammar.  The grammatical way of composing the lines would be: “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long / That it had its head bit off by its young.”  The intentionally bad grammar intensifies the shocking character of the image.  Since the cuckoo and the hedge-sparrow belong to different species within the avian kingdom, the Fool might even be suggesting that Lear’s daughters belong to a different species than the King—though, to be historically precise, Linnaeus established the separate classification of dunnock and cuckoos slightly over 150 years after this play was composed (in 1758).  If the Fool intends that they belong to the same family, this is an image of the daughters cannibalizing their father.

Soon after his eldest daughters drive him down, inverting the traditional father-daughter relationship,[ix] Lear becomes estranged from himself; he becomes unrecognizably other.  Alienated from himself, alienated from his estate, which he has imprudently given to his eldest daughters, Lear can no longer recognize himself: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” [I:iv].  His previous self is foreign to him: “Does any here know me?  Why, this is not Lear” [Ibid.].  He is the father who is father no more; he is the king who is king in title only.  For much of his life, he thought of himself as father and as king.  Now that the roles of father and king have been robbed of their substance, he does not recognize who he is.  This non-self-recognition is madness.[x]

Lear tries to strip off his royal habiliments in the storm, which would be a kind of stripping-away of the symbols of royal authority, but is restrained by the Fool.  The Fool is introduced in Act One: Scene Four, three scenes after the befooling of Lear has been initiated.  The Fool disappears in Act Three: Scene Six, right after Lear says, “We’ll go to supper in’the morning” [III:vi], which means that Lear is now completely demented.  Now, it is the King who has become the Fool.  What use is the Fool when the King is foolish?  It is only when the Fool is hanged that we hear of the Fool again.

Even though, on the surface, Cordelia has “scanted” her “obedience” [I:i] by avoiding an explicit declaration of love for her father, she shows signs of real devotion to him toward the end of the play, when she leads a charge into England to restore him to the throne.  After the first scene of the first act, we do not see Cordelia again until the fourth scene of Act Four, wherein she reemerges as the Queen of France.  At least, this is the case in the Quarto of 1608.  There are significant discontinuities between the Quarto of 1608 and the First Folio of 1623.  In the First Folio, Cordelia reappears in the third scene of “Actus Quartus,” surrounded by pendants, drums, and her entourage: “Enter with Drum and Colours, Cordelia, Gentlemen, and Souldiours.”

One of Cordelia’s roles, after she accedes to the queenship of France, is to re-man, to re-virilize Lear, to undo the unmanning to which he has been subjected: “How does my royal lord?  How fares your majesty?” Cordelia asks her father in the seventh scene of the fourth act—without ever addressing him as her father!  No, she gives Lear a higher status than that of a father, than that of a biological progenitor.  He is the King, her royal lord, his majesty once more, and he is addressed with respect—and yet, for once, one senses that there is no malice beneath a shifty veneer of respectfulness.

The play does end in a certain restoration—the King reunites with his disowned daughter—and it is a beautiful resipiscence, a beautiful reconciliation between father and daughter, which makes the play almost endurable.  At the risk of sounding facile, this is a very dreary, very abjective, and quite nauseating play, but it does contain one positive value, and that is the value of covert loyalty.  Whereas Harold Bloom inflates the role of Edgar, I would emphasize the magnificent Kent.  Even when he disguises himself and escapes banishment, Kent does so in order to better serve his master.  Kent’s dishonesty masks a deeper honesty, his deceptions mask a deeper loyalty, as Cordelia’s phenomenal coldness masks a profounder warmth.  Kent shows a deeper obedience to Lear by standing up to the King and telling him, in essence, that the King is acting against his own best interests.  Kent is the very model of disloyal loyalty, of traitorous piety, of the fidelity of treason, which is something that Nietzsche knew well.

Joseph Suglia

[i] These are not matters that I am able to pursue in this essay directly, so I will place the relevant citations within an endnote.  Concerning the ocular metaphors: Goneril claims, phonily, that her father is “[d]earer than eyesight” to her [I:i].  Lear exclaims to Kent: “Out of my sight!”  Kent’s response: “See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye” [Ibid.].  Lear says to his own eyes: “Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck yet out…” [I:iv].  Concerning the metaphors of nullity, within which Harold Bloom would see a creative gnostic vacuity: There are Cordelia and Lear’s “Nothings” in the first scene.  Edmund says to his father, “Nothing, my lord” in the second scene of the play.  In the fourth scene of the first act, Lear tells the Fool that “nothing can be made out of nothing.”  The Fool says to Lear: “I am a fool, thou art nothing” [Ibid.].

[ii] Cordelia knows the deceptiveness of language, as does her male double, Edgar.  Edgar says, to himself, that “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” [IV:i].  The verbal articulation of one’s condition nullifies that very condition.  One is not fully lonely, as long as one can say, “I am lonely,” to follow Blanchot.  One is not fully sad, as long as one can say, “I am sad.”  One at least has energy enough to say that one is sad; one still opens the possibility of an addressee or an auditor when one says that one is lonely.

[iii] So scandalized is Lear that he (ostensibly) delights in the company of his youngest daughter no more than he delights in the company of cannibals: “[H]e that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom / Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, / As thou my sometime daughter” [I:i], Lear intones to Cordelia.

[iv] Cordelia, by contrast, is reticent: “To speak and purpose not—since what I well intend, / I’ll do’t before I speak” [I:i].

[v] By way of an illocutionary performative speech act.

[vi] Regan and Goneril’s insubordination of their father is mirrored by the bastard Edmund’s insubordination of his father.  Edmund betrays his father, the Earl of Gloucester, as Goneril and Regan betray their father, Lear.  Edmund, at least, becomes sympathetic in his dying.  In his final moments, he has a coda of self-acknowledgement.  Not so Goneril and Regan.  Edmund is an obvious sociopath but is less dislikable than Goneril and Regan.

[vii] Lear is King James I perceived through the speculum of a funhouse mirror.  Much as James I, who patronized Shakespeare and whom Shakespeare served when this play was first performed, King Lear demands absolute obedience.  James I asserted his absolute authority in writing, in The True Law of Free Monarchies; or, The Reciprocal and Mutual Duty Betwixt a Free King and His Natural Subjects (originally published in 1598).  Anyone who reads this text will see that James I considered obedience to the King to be identical to obedience to God.  Intriguingly, Shakespeare seems to be subtly criticizing his patron.  Both James I and Lear make the mistake of believing that an outward show of submission is true obedience.  Moreover, James I similarly divided his estate, giving it to his sons, renouncing the ownership of moieties of his land and money.  Instead of burbling about Shakespeare’s “universalism” or “infinity,” it is important to place the plays within their proper historical contexts.  “Universalism” and “infinity”: Such are a few of the pomposities and vaporizings of Harold Bloom, who is otherwise often admirable.

[viii] Lear is nothing if not the Father.  If he is not patriarchal, then no one is.

[ix] Lear is infantilized, becoming son to Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia.  In this play, daughters are mothers to their father.  “Old fools are babes again,” Goneril says of her father to Oswald [I:iii].  The Fool tells Lear, “[T]hou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers” [I:iv].  Similarly, Edmund says of his brother Edgar that the latter claimed: “[T]he father should be as ward to the son and the son manage his revenue” [I:ii].  Likewise, Edgar says of his father, “He childed as I father’d” [III:vi], implying an inversion of relation between father and son.  It is an inverted world in which the characters are dwelling, one in which the home-space is outside of the kingdom and the outside is within: “Freedom lives hence and banishment is here” [I:i], as Kent phrases it.

[x] There is a great deal of self-estrangement in the play.  Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom, peasant and bedlamite, before becoming the next King of England, and Kent disguises himself as Caius before being recognized for who he is by the dying Lear in the final act.  In the guise of Poor Tom, Edgar dispatches the vermin Oswald and Edmund, who have verminated England.  Interestingly, there is a legend that the historical King Edgar committed lupicide, dispatching and expelling wolves from Albion immediately after he became king.

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An Analysis of THE MOST LAMENTABLE ROMAN TRAGEDY OF TITUS ANDRONICUS (Shakespeare) / TITUS ANDRONICUS by William Shakespeare / TITUS / An Essay on TITUS ANDRONICUS (Shakespeare) by Joseph Suglia

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An Analysis of The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare)

by Joseph Suglia

“Does man kill or torture because he has come to the conclusion that he has the right to do so?  He kills because others kill.  He tortures because others torture…  I kill because you kill.  You and he and all of you torture; therefore, I torture.  I killed him because you would have killed me if I had not.  Such is the grammar of our time.”

—Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, Volume One, 1953

In his 1927 essay “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” T. S. Eliot called The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all.”  Whether Shakespeare had any hand in the play is unknown, though I suspect that the insert Act Three: Scene Two, which concerns muscicide, was not inked by the Bard.  However, we do know something about the hands of the play’s characters.  One of the characters of the play, Lavinia, ends up with no hands at all, and her father, Titus, ends up with only one hand.  Moreover, Lavinia is reduced to tongueless inarticulacy, and the flesh of two teenage boys is baked into a pie that is fed to their mother.  All of this is to suggest that The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s goriest, grisliest, ghastliest play, a work that telegraphs and anticipates Jacobean Tragedy, Grand Guignol, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and splatter-cinema.

REVENGE IS EXCHANGE

Fresh from a ten-year battle against the Goths, Titus Andronicus is implored by his son Lucius to sacrifice “the proudest prisoner” of the enemy [I:i].  At the opening of the text, the Goths, the immigrants of the play, are the enemy; at the end of the play, the immigrants will become the friends of the Andronici and will overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Saturninus.  We are reminded that the incursion, the influx, of the Goths will lead to the breakdown of imperial Rome on 24 August 410 C.E.[1]

Titus orders Tamora’s son Alarbus to be killed.  The son is brutally sacrificed—his limbs abscised, his intestines fed to the flames: “Alarbus’ limbs are lopp’d, / And entrails feed the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky” [I:i].  The ritualistic disembowelment and dismemberment at the beginning of the play initiate a revenge series.  The Queen of the Goths, Tamora, will exact her revenge against Titus.  Her reckoning is a form of exchange.  In exchange for the death and mutilation of Alarbus, the tongue of Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, is excised and her hands are severed off; Titus’s sons Quintus and Martius are decapitated.  The maimed bodies of Lavinia, Quintus, and Martius correspond to the maimed body of Alarbus—anatomical parts of three children are torn off in exchange for the lopping off of the limbs of the child of the rival family.

A bloody pattern unfolds—one revenge leads to another revenge.  The decapitation of Titus’s sons will, in turn, lead to the decapitation of Demetrius and Chiron.  One plate of heads replaces another plate of heads.  Such is the logic of revenge: Revenge is exchange.  And yet the acts of reckoning do not equalize one another.

The attacks on Titus’s children take place in the forest.  “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf and dull,” says Aaron to the future rapists and mutilators Chiron and Demetrius [I:i].  The forest is a place of uncivilized desires, of desires far from the ritualized boundedness of civilization.  The forest is not a locus amoenus.  (A locus amoenus is an innocently pleasant site in a work of literature.)  As we know from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, the forest in Shakespeare is a place of deception, of dissimulation, of lying, of self-masking, of delusion, of chimera.

Titus dramatizes insanity, which allows Tamora and her sons to underestimate him.  Disguised as Revenge, Rape, and Murder, respectively, Tamora and her sons are incompetent dramatists, whereas Titus is an inspired dramatist.  In the 1999 cinematic interpretation of the play, directed by Julie Taymor, Titus hatchets off his hand with a meat cleaver in the kitchen—presaging his final self-staging as a cook in the super-stylized, meta-theatrical vengeance against Tamora and Saturninus.  He dramatizes revenge at the end of the play, in a space that is a theatre, a banquet hall, and a kangaroo court all at once.  The play-within-the-play is an ambush dinner, a prandial revenge.  Choreographed revenge leads to imperial succession—at the beginning of the play, Titus Andronicus declines the emperorship.  At the end of the play, his son Lucius assumes the emperorship.

Why should Titus be more sympathetic than Tamora?  Why does Titus have the right to vengeance—and not Tamora?  Does she not have equal cause?

Titus doesn’t seem to care about his son Mutius, whom he summarily slays out of duty to the emperor, who, in turn, has no problem betraying his own people by marrying the queen of the enemy, but Titus does care about his only daughter, Lavinia, after he learns that she has been mutilated and (later) learns that she has been violated.  Only after Lavinia is raped and mutilated does Titus becomes a full, empathic human being.  Paternal filicide is supposed to be accepted by the audience with relative equanimity; the violation and mutilation of one’s daughter by strangers is supposed to outrage that same audience.

Consider that the slaying of Mutius takes place onstage, whereas the violation and mutilation of Lavinia take place offstage: The visibility of Mutius has the effect of making Titus appear more sympathetic to us than Tamora, I would argue, since what is seen is more manageable, more tolerable, than what is unseen.  What is unseen is always more horrifying than what is seen—our imagination exaggerates the unseen to obscenely grotesque proportions.  The one truly horrific mutilation—that of Lavinia—takes place offstage and is nothing to laugh at.  The fact that Lavinia’s violation and mutilation take place offstage make these acts unspeakable—as she is rendered an unspeakable presence.

It is not Aaron the Moor who initiates the sequence of retaliations.  One of the Romans says that Aaron incited the series of vengeances, the blood-saturated revenge series, but this is not so: “Give sentence on this execrable wretch / That hath been breeder of these dire events” [V:iii].  It is not Aaron who breeds the dire events of the play—it is Titus Andronicus himself!  It is Titus, again, who orders the killing of Alarbus, the dismembering of his arms and legs, the engulfing of his viscera in flame.  Why, then, should we spectators and readers care more about Titus than we do about Tamora?  Both Titus and Tamora say to their children, to paraphrase: If you love me, you will kill my enemies.[2]

SHE CANNOT SPEAK, BUT SHE CAN WRITE

Lavinia endures a terrible glossectomy and a terrible dismemberment: Again, her tongue is cut out, and her hands are cut off.  What remains of her power of speech?  Only tormented and inarticulate groanings.  She cannot phonate, but she can communicate in other ways.  That is to suggest: She is afflicted with aphonia (the inability to vocalize), not with agraphia (the inability to write) or with aphasia (the inability to communicate).

Marcus teaches his niece how to write.  He takes his staff and writes his name in the dirt.  He then encourages his daughter to imitate his scrawl: “Heaven guide thy pen to print thy sorrows plain” [IV:i].  She then takes the staff in her mouth and guides it with her stumps and writes out the name of the heinous crime that was committed against her and the names of the heinous criminals.

Lavinia’s body becomes a book that is readable by her father.  The word is made mutilated flesh.  Titus is able to read her tears.  Titus the Father knows that his daughter is a “[s]peechless complainer” [Ibid.].  Her body becomes a “map of woe, that thus doth talk in signs” [Ibid.]—her body has a language, even though that language is silent.  “I understand her signs,” Titus says of Lavinia’s soundless weeping [III:i]—Marcus’s napkin can never dry her tears. When she kisses the decapitated heads of her brothers Quintus and Martius in Act Three: Scene One, this is a sign—if this is not a sign, then what is a sign?

By becoming her interpreter, Titus has become a strong parent for the first time in his life, both father and mother at the same time.  He vocalizes what his only daughter cannot.  He is the interpreter of her spastic mutism, of her mute language.  “I can interpret all her martyred signs,” he says [III:ii].  The father will “wrest” from his daughter an “alphabet” and “learn to know [her] meaning” [Ibid.]—and Lavinia’s body is a sign of martyrdom.  For to be a martyr means to give testimony, to write.  Self-sacrifice is absolute loss; martyrdom is self-loss that enhances a cause or a program.  In the case of Lavinia, her rape, mutilation, and eventual killing lead to a revolution—much in the way that the rape and suicide of Lucretia did (I will return to this point below).

With her father’s hand in her mouth, Lavinia still has the power of language—the power of silent language, of writing, which is always silent.  The hand in the mouth—is this not the perfect symbol for writing?  The vocalization of her written language is under the guidance of her father, her interpreter, who still has the power of speech.

Wittgenstein writes, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”  Though I am not a Derridean, this line of Derrida against Wittgenstein seems a propos to the context: “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”  Lavinia writes when she does not speak—this might mean that writing is something other than a substitute for speech.  When she inscribes words on the dirty ground with a stick that is guided by her tongueless mouth and her handless arms, Lavinia makes the names of the crime and the criminals readable, even though her mouth is silenced and even though she is deprived of the ability to write with her hands: “Stuprum.  Chiron.  Demetrius” [IV:i].  Her tongue and her hands are erased, and yet she still produces language—again, with the guidance of the father.[3]

There is one moment in the play, however, in which the father’s temporary inability to speak mirrors the daughter’s inability to speak.  What does Titus do when he learns that his daughter has been hideously mutilated, to the point at which she can no longer speak, when he learns that his son Lucius has been exiled from the city of his birth to the otherlands, the shadowlands of the Goths, when he learns that his sons Quintus and Martius have been falsely accused of a crime and then executed, when he learns that he has been tricked into chopping off his own hand to save their lives, in vain?  He laughs.  Indeed, he erupts in maniacal laughter: “Ha, ha, ha!” [III:i].  Titus gives up all pretensions of comfort and enters wordless despair, an abyss of non-verbality.  From that abyss comes vengeance; his laughter issues in the spawning of the plot of revenge.  Non-verbal expression—wordless laughter—corresponds to Lavinia’s wordlessness.  Her silence corresponds to her father’s non-verbal-yet-signifying language: “Ha, ha, ha!”

It is not the case that laughter is an inappropriate response to the irremediable.  Laughter might be the only appropriate response to the irremediable.

This raises the question of the status of humor in the play.  Some audiences find it funny to watch Titus, Lucius, and Marcus squabble over whose hand should be severed (in Act Three: Scene One).  What makes this scene so morbidly hilarious and hilariously morbid to them is the contrast, the incongruity, between the super-seriousness of the context and the silliness of the conversation.  Some audiences find it funny to watch Lavinia clutch her father’s severed hand in her teeth (Titus: “Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth” [III:i]).  The humorousness of such scenes highlights and intensifies the play’s seriousness; the humor does not erode the seriousness.  Shakespeare knows well that his jocoserious play would become ludicrous if it were humorless, if it were uninterruptedly serious.  Without humor, there can be no seriousness.  Why is this?  Because humorlessness is laughable.

Is it inappropriate when Marcus rhapsodizes and poeticizes upon discovering his niece hideously disfigured in the wood?  Strangely, there are literary critics who think that it is.  I don’t think that his soliloquy, the longest in the play (it is forty-six lines, longer than Titus’s soliloquy as he slices the throats of Chiron and Demetrius, which is thirty-nine lines long), is inappropriate (as some other critics do); I do think of it as a coping mechanism, as a means of coming to terms with trauma, as a means of coping with the violation and mutilation of his niece.  Still, it must be written: Marcus speaks on his niece’s behalf, whereas Titus speaks in her behalf.

To return to the main argument: Lavinia is ultra-literate, even after her disfigurement.  One should contrast Lavinia’s superior reading skills with the illiteracy of the children of Tamora.  The dull-witted Chiron and Demetrius cannot interpret the meaning of Titus’s citation of Horace, though Aaron can.  When the voices of Chiron and Demetrius are silenced (they are gagged by Publius; this is their metamorphosis, their becoming-bestial), this answers to the silencing of Lavinia.  Lavinia, says her father, is “deeper read and better skilled” [IV:i] than those who waste their time on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  These days, only graduate students read the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

Shakespeare is reminding us of the ineluctableness of language.  Language is not reducible to the organ that we normally associate with language: the tongue (speech, phonē).  Shakespeare is suggesting that language is not phonocentric; he might even be suggesting that language is graphocentric, which is to suggest that written language is more fundamental than speech.

Even though she is tongueless and handless, Lavinia still has the power of language—in the form of writing, of graphē, of hypergraphia, of graphomania.

Lavinia inscribes words upon the Earth.  She is metaphorized as a storm cloud—a cloud that gives forth rain.  She writes with her tears upon the Earth.  Her tears are the ink, and the Earth is the paper upon which she is writing.  Lavinia writes upon the Earth with her tears and thus revivifies, rejuvenates, refreshes, renews, revitalizes the Earth.  Her tears—her sufferings and the accusations against her attackers, her assailants, her assaulters—will bring about a transformation of the City of Rome.  She will transform the Holy Roman Empire—it will be reconfigured into a Gothic-Roman state, a republic that welcomes and integrates outsiders.

Lavinia is a figure of democracy and of democratization.

THE ORIGIN OF THE LAVINIA STORY

There are at least three literary and historical references that frame the rape of Lavinia:

a.) We are reminded of the rape of Lucretia.[4]  Shakespeare, after all, would write his poem “The Rape of Lucrece” in 1594, almost exactly the same time as he wrote this play.  The rape of Lucretia led to the driving-away from Rome of the last of the kings of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, whose slobbering, sinister, psychopathic son Sextus raped the poor girl.  She killed herself out of shame.  The plebeian Lavinia is here placed in the position of a figure of republicanism and anti-tyrannousness.  Just as the tyranny of the Tarquins is expelled from Rome, so will the tyranny of Saturninus be.

b.) To accuse her attackers of the crime of rape, Lavinia opens a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and turns over the pages with her stumps until she arrives at the Rape of Philomela.[5]  Now, there is no mystery of what happened to her.  Every tragedy contains anagnorisis, and this is the moment of recognition: “Lavinia,” her father asks her, “[W]ert thou thus surprised, sweet girl, / Ravished and wronged as Philomela was…?” [IV:i].[6]  This recognition comes by way of reading.  Tereus was married to Progne yet burned with mortal lust for her sister Philomela, whom he raped in the forest; then, he plucked out her tongue and left her for dead in a cabin in the woods.  Philomela, however, survived and wove a tapestry that both identified the crime that was committed against her and revealed the identity of her rapist.  Both sisters exacted a dreadful revenge against Tereus by killing his son Itys and feeding the offspring to the father in the form of a pie.  Swallowing one’s own offspring, of course, will inspire Titus’s prandial revenge against Tamora, in which he forces Tamora to cannibalize, to engorge her sons Chiron and Demetrius.  Tamora is conned into consuming her issue, conned into ingesting her offspring, conned into digesting her discharge, much as Tereus was.  What is interesting about Shakespeare’s reinvention of the Philomela myth is that his Lavinia points to a passage in Ovid—making her a reader and a teacher of reading.  She, after all, is the Young Lucius’s reading teacher.  Marcus says of the boy’s aunt: “[S]he hath read to thee sweet poetry and Tully’s Orator” [IV:i].  Tully’s Orator is a book of rhetoric.  The point here, I think, is that Lavinia is not merely a writer; she is one who teaches how to write well.

c.) The myth of Diana and Actaeon appears and reappears throughout the play.  Bassianus mock-wonders of Tamora, whom he accosts with Lavinia in the forest, if he is looking at the Goddess Diana herself: “Or is it Dian, habited like her, / Who hath abandoned her holy groves / To see the general hunting in this forest?” [II:ii].[7]  Tamora will become Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, quick-transforming the interloper Bassianus into a metaphorical stag that is torn to pieces by her metaphorical bloodhounds.  Bassianus is the cuckold.  He spies on the naked bathing goddess, exposing her in her divine nudity.  Of course, in the myth, the goddess does not assume any particular female shape—she is mutable, transformative—which means that Actaeon is spying upon not the goddess herself, but rather upon a hollow image, before being rent to pieces by her bloodhounds.  The bloodhounds, in Shakespeare’s play, are Tamora’s sons, who murder Bassianus and make of him a cuckold (they be-horn him, fastening metaphorical antlers upon his head).  After she catches Actaeon spying on her divine nudity, Diana screeches: “Tell that you saw me here bathing naked—if you can tell at all!”  Lavinia, voyeuse, will be robbed of the power of speech.  Female voyeurism is a rare subject—but it is presented in Shakespeare.  Actaeon thus figures both Bassianus and Lavinia.[8]

DID HEIDEGGER HAVE SMALL HANDS?

Why the removal of hands?  Heidegger gives us a possible answer in What Is Called Thinking? / Was Heißt Denken?:

The hand is a peculiar thing.  In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism.  But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp.  Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands.  The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence.  Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.

We now know that some of Heidegger’s comparative anatomy is false.  Chimpanzees do have hands—they even have opposable thumbs—and some animal biologists tell us that chimpanzee hands are more complex than human hands.  The next passage is more interesting.  Heidegger goes on:

But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine.  The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull.  The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others.  The hand holds.  The hand carries.  The hand signs, presumably because the human being is a sign.

The English translation is wrong at this point, and I have corrected it.  In the German, the text reads: “Die Hand zeichnet, vermutlich weil der Mensch ein Zeichen ist.”  Heidegger continues:

Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry the human being into the great oneness.  The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft.  Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further.  But the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when human beings speak by being silent.  And only when human beings speak, do they think—not the other way around, as metaphysics believes.

So: Humankind is practiced through the hand.  The hand is not an implement of the human; the hand holds within itself the essence of the human.  The hand is the distinguishing trait of human essence.  The hand is not a form of property, something that belongs to us; the hand has us.  Only that being which has language is handed.  Language is not language without the hand.  Only with the hand does the human come about; the hand is the essential ground of humankind.

Is there a relation to the word without the hand?  It seems not.  There is, for Heidegger, a co-belongingness between word and hand.  There must be a hand in order for human language to be.  This means that writing is more fundamental than speech, than phonē.

When hands are removed, the intention is dehumanization.

HOLORHYMING WITH THE BIEBMASTER

So many have declaimed that The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus is a bad play that people believe that it is a bad play.  It is, I would argue, one of Shakespeare’s ten greatest plays, but it does contain some weaknesses.

There are some rather weak puns: “Deer” is rhymed with its homophone “dear” in Act Three: Scene One.  And yet even this pun is defensible.  Marcus calls Lavinia a “deer,” whereas Titus calls his daughter a “dear.”  For Marcus, Lavinia is a wounded sylvan beast; for Titus, she is a darling.  For Marcus, Lavinia is a premature corpse (“This was thy daughter”), whereas for Titus, she is a living human presence (“so she is“) [emphases mine].  The parechesis of “throats” and “threat” in the same scene is not very strong.  (Parechesis is the repetition of the same sound in quick succession.)

Titus offers to chop off his hands before he is prompted to do so, even before Aaron comes by: “Give me a sword, I’ll chop off my hands too” [III:i] and “[S]hall we cut away our hands like thine [Lavinia’s]?” [Ibid.].  Titus offers to hack off his hand before he is given the fake opportunity to redeem his sons by hacking off his hands.  But his sons are unrehabilitatable in the eyes of the emperor.  The overplay of “I-will-cut-off-my hand” derogates from the power of the moment in which Titus is actually tricked into hacking off his own hand.

Worst of all are the final two lines of the play (in the Arden edition, not in the MIT online edition):

[Tamora’s] life was beastly and devoid of pity, / And being dead, let birds on her take pity [V:iii].

This is bad writing.  One thing that I tell my students is never end two successive sentences with the same word.  When writing verse, never rhyme the endings of the lines of a couplet with the same word.

Rhyming a sound with itself (holorhyming) is never a good idea.  Consider the closest thing that our time has to Shakespeare, the great poet Justin Bieber.  In his otherwise masterly ballad “Yellow Raincoat,” from the 2012 album Believe, Bieber intones these lines:

Well never do I ever do I ever want this to phase me
Well never do I ever do I want this thing to make me

Rhyming homophones is an infelicity; rhyming a word with itself is an even more infelicitous writerly fault.  Shakespeare is a slightly greater poet than Justin Bieber, and there might be justification for his rhyming of the word pity with itself.  What if Shakespeare wants to evoke Lucius’s lack of pity for Tamora by repeating the word pity?  The repetition of the word might drain the concept of its significance.  Lucius’s coldness, his glaciality, might mean that he is no more compassionate than Tamora.

EVERY ACT OF REVENGE PRODUCES A REMAINDER

The desire for revenge is the desire for superiority over another human being.  By inflicting pain on the revengee, the revenger demonstrates his or her superiority over the revengee.  This explains why the most selfish, the vainest, the most egoic human beings also tend to be the most vengeful.  However, as Schopenhauer reminds us in Parerga and Paralipomena, “[J]ust as every fulfilled wish is more or less unveiled as a delusion, so too the desire for revenge.”  The word delusion is in English in the original text, which is mostly written in German.

Why is the desire for revenge a delusion?  I would submit the following: The avenger is dependent on the avengee.  Doesn’t revenge make the avenger dependent on the consciousness of the avengee?  If you seek revenge on someone, are you not dependent on the person on whom you wish to avenge yourself?

Try not to place yourself in a position in which vengeance is necessary.  What if my “revenge” were one day ineffective?  What if my acts of “vengeance” were in vain?  What if the objects of my “vengeance” were indifferent to my actions and inactions?

If the object of “revenge” is indifferent to the avenger, the avengee has won and the avenger has lost.  This means that the avenger is emotionally enchained to the emotional state of the avengee.  Revenge means that one is dependent on the object of vengeance, “drinking poison and expecting the other person to die,” as the Buddha says.  Or holding on to hot coal and expecting the other person to be burned, as Confucius says.

The desire for revenge is an obsession with the other human being who, imaginarily or not, has wounded us.  But revenge only enlarges that wound.

In the third scene of the fourth act, there is a great deal of talk of justice, which, like revenge, is often conceived as a form of exchange.  As his kinsmen are drawing their bows, Titus says that there is as little justice in the sea as there is on Earth.  And he also says, in Latin, “Terras Astraea reliquit,” which means: “Justice has left the Earth.”  A just world would be one in which the Romans join forces with the Goths and create a democratic republic in Rome, a republic that would welcome and integrate immigrants.  But currently, in Act Four, there is no justice under the moon, there is no fairness, there is no one-to-one exchange.

Consider this: For the death of Alarbus, Quintus, Martius, and Bassianus are killed (three for the price of one), Lucius is banished, Titus is conned into hacking off one of his hands, and Lavinia is ravished and mangled.  There is no equitableness, and justice would mean fair exchange of one thing for a thing of equal value.  The counter-revenge of Titus and his tribe does not posit equivalence between the losses that they have suffered and the violence that they have inflicted on Saturninus and Tamora. In The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, the desire for revenge results in the almost total self-destruction of the revengers and their families.

In revenge, there is always a remainder.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

[1] Lucius is banished to the otherlands of the Goths, but unlike Coriolanus (who is explicitly referred to in the play, in Act Four: Scene Four), he is not scuppered by one of his parents.  Lucius, unlike Coriolanus, wages a war against Rome, the city of his birth, and crashes its gates—with the approval of one of his parents, his father Titus.  I am revising this essay in 2019, at a time of seismic immigration crises throughout Europe.  Since the Goths assist Lucius in overthrowing a corrupt dictatorship, we can safely infer that Shakespeare’s great play is friendlier to immigration than his own later Tragedy of Coriolanus will be.

[2] Tamora: “Revenge it as you love your mother’s life, / Or be ye not henceforth called my children” [II:ii].  Titus: “And if ye love me, as I think you do, / Let’s kiss and part, for we have much to do” [III:i].

[3] Chiron: “Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so, / And if thy stumps will let thee, play the scribe” [II:iii]. / Demetrius: “See how with signs and tokens she can scrawl.”  But she can write, even though her hands are now stumps.

[4] In Act Two: Scene One, Aaron says: “Lucrece was not more chaste / Than this Lavinia, Bassianus’ love.”  In Act Four: Scene One, Titus asks: “What Roman lord it was durst do the deed: / Or slunk not Saturnine, as Tarquin erst, / That left the camp to sin in Lucrece’s bed?”

[5] Marcus, upon finding his niece in the wood, already identified her with Philomel: “A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, / And he hath cut those pretty fingers off, / That could have better sewed than Philomel” [II:iii].

[6] And later: “Far worse than Philomel you used my daughter, / And worse than Progne I will be revenged” [V:ii].

[7] Tamora’s response: “Had I the power that some say Dian had, / Thy temples should be planted presently / With horns, as was Actaeon’s, and the hounds / Should drive upon thy new-transformed limbs. / Unmannerly intruder as thou art” [II:ii].

[8] In the shelter of the wood, Aaron says to his forbidden lover Tamora: “[Bassianus’s] Philomel must lose her tongue today” [II:ii].  Bassianus’s Philomel is Lavinia, of course.

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