Macbeth Act Three Scene Four.
The coronation feast and celebration occurs after the secret murder of Banquo. This is heavily ironic and the act of a consummate charlatan, yet it unravels with the bloody reappearance of the revenant, Banquo, to haunt Macbeth. His murder was ordered by Macbeth and has been kept a secret from his wife. The audience knows that Banquo’s son, Fleance has escaped thus ruining Macbeth’s attempt to thwart the prediction of the witches and to avoid a ‘fruitless’ crown as he is without an heir.
Think about the way that Shakespeare has orchestrated this scene and structured it to unsettle both the audience and the protagonists. Think also about the audience trapped on stage witnessing this grotesque parody of a celebration. How will they process this macabre spectacle of a King unravelling his mental state before their eyes? Was has become of the Macbeth who valued secrecy and duplicitous discretion?
Some questions are included below to deepen any analysis of this unusually unsettling scene, emanating from three personal observations as I read and watched the play.
In brief:
A) Where is Macduff?
B) What has changed about Lady Macbeth’s relationship with her husband?
C) Why does the stage direction suggest Banquo’s presence but only Macbeth sees him, significantly in his chair?
A few questions to help with any analysis of this scene:
1) Why might Macduff’s absence be irksome to Macbeth as well as being a dramatic necessity? What would Macduff have discerned as a result of Macbeth’s increasingly bizarre behaviour in this scene? Do you think Macduff might have become suspicious of Macbeth’s behaviour and intervened amidst the emotional chaos, thus ending the play?
2) The first murderer proudly informs Macbeth that Banquo lies dead in a ‘ditch’ with ‘twenty trenched gashes.’ Why do you think this gruesomely specific detail is mentioned before Macbeth imagines the ghost of Banquo sitting in his chair, usurping his place at the table? Think about Macbeth s hysterical command to the ghost, ‘ they canst not say I did it: never shake thy gory locks at me.’ Why do you think that Macbeth denies his involvement with the murder to the ghost when he ordered his best friend’s assassination? And notice the use of the adjective, ‘gory’ to describe the gratuitous viciousness of Banquo’s injuries. Is this haunting compounded by the bloodiness of King Duncan’s murder, so that the reanimation of Banquo’s corpse contains aspects of Duncan’s slaughter too? The first murder haunts the second.
3) This scene is fascinating as it reveals the ignorance of Lady Macbeth about Banquo’s murder. She is now becoming estranged from her husband’s thoughts and behaviours and their intimacy is clearly diminished. Why do you think that Macbeth shrouded his plans in secrecy about the murder of Banquo? Do you think his behaviour is an unconscious dismissal of Lady Macbeth? Has she become redundant? Is there any irony in her marginalization by her husband after the murder of the King? Is this dismal celebration a dramatic form of moral justice for their aberrant crimes?
4 Lady Macbeth has to improvise excuses for her husband’s strange behaviour in front of the Scottish nobility. She is resourceful as she declares of Macbeth, ‘ that my Lord is often this/and hath been from his youth’ such an excuse attempts explain the seeming fit or sudden insanity of Macbeth whose anxious ranting at the invisible Banquo upsets the party. Her clever improvisation and resourcefulness, prove her dedication to her regal status and duty as a wife to support her husband. However, her asides suggest her annoyance with Macbeth for jeopardizing their new positions as King and Queen. Interestingly she resorts to her familiar chastisements about manliness, ‘ Are you a man?‘ But finds they no longer have the same effect. Banquo’s ghost is too powerful an adversary and suggests Macbeth is too unsettled to be reined in/subjugated by human insults.
5) Maybe this scene also highlights the limitations of Lady Macbeth’s imagination. ‘You look but on a stool.’ Lady Macbeth’s patronising certainty dismisses the possibility of Macbeth’s phantom. And her denigration of her husband replicates the same insults as she used before Duncan was murdered. ‘What, quite unmann’d in folly?’ Lady Macbeth appears limited in her understanding of others. Her lack of empathy possibly contributes to her growing estrangement from her beloved partner in ‘greatness.’
The lack of understanding extends to Lady Macbeth’s dismissal of the possibility that the supernatural might seek revenge for their criminal actions. The Queen again demonstrates an abject failure of her imagination as she had been more than willing to embrace the supernatural predictions of the witches before. It feels as if the Queen is highly selective in her attitudes towards the invisible world, a long way from her infamous invocation to the spirits to ‘ unsex me here’ Irony seems lost on Lady Macbeth. Her behaviour and sensibility are harsh and inconsiderate even of her closest ally.
Perhaps she thinks that belittling her husband will extricate him from his fearful visitation. This again indicates an imaginative failure on her part. Such a failure ultimately leads to her suicide after she finds that her isolation and breakdown in marital intimacy incite overwhelming feelings of guilt. When Lady Macbeth is forced by loneliness into self-reflection, the results are mentally catastrophically her, though they do give representation to repression and some conscience.
But in this scene the trite dismissal of Macbeth’s hallucinatory experiences and vividly experienced imagination, as ‘ a woman’s story at a winter’s fire,‘ expose Lady Macbeth’s innate limitations and foreshadow her eventual obsession with blood and the need for permanent light to protect her from her guilty thoughts.
5) Is Banquo a hallucination created out of a guilty, restless mind or is the ghost real, but disconcertingly only visible to Macbeth? Remember the stage directions do say, ‘ The Ghost of Banquo enters,’ so the director has to decide how the presence of Banquo is shown on stage and this decision affects the meaning of the ghost’s haunting appearance.
Obviously, Macbeth has also been disconcerted that the brutal assassination of his best friend has left Fleance alive and free to implicate Macbeth and eventually (according to the witches) inherit the throne due to the ‘fruitless’ situation of Macbeth who has no children to inherit his crown. Thus Macbeth is acutely aware that his secret attempt to destroy the possibility of Fleance inheriting the crown has failed.
Failure might agitate the imagination of Macbeth to a feverish extent.
It is also possible that Banquo wishes to destroy the mental credibility of his treacherous best friend by usurping his coronation feast. Revenge is a potent reason for a ghost to return to the living world. And the betrayal of Macbeth is extreme. He has killed his best friend who has not betrayed him, despite his very real doubts about Macbeth s behaviour concisely expressed by Banquo via the soliloquy at the beginning of Act Three.
6) I have mentioned the disparity between the imagination of Lady Macbeth and her tormented husband. This disparity is ironically expressed at the end of this scene where Lady Macbeth recommends rest to calm her husband’s agitation and disquiet. ‘ You lack the season of all natures, sleep.’ This recommendation attempts to solve the problem in a version of Macbeth’s own belief expressed after the murder of the sleeping Duncan that he ‘ does murther sleep.’ Think about the way the theme of sleep and its link to innocence is repeated throughout the play. Why does lady Macbeth appear to absorb her husband’s anxiety about the slaughter of sleep by Act Five? Are the husband and wife like two halves of the same being?
If we consider the nightmarish avowal expressed confidentially to his wife that ‘ I am in blood stepp’d so far,’ it is apparent that her skills of empathy are limited and foreshadow not only their estrangement but also her final madness as she fails to understand even herself.
Macbeth’s perturbation at the sea of blood he has created is vividly described and suggests its powerful reality to him. Imaginatively Macbeth animates his guilt and corruption and closes the scene by determining to seek the further advice of the witches, a step that seems doomed and likely to corrupt him further as he has the prescience to remind his wife ‘that’re are yet but young in deed.’ Such a chilling announcement completes the scene of horror and retribution perfectly by promising even more to come!
