Macbeth GCSE Extract Question Act Five Scene Eight: Analysis and Notes on Macbeth’s Death and the Ambiguity of Malcolm’s Kingship.

Further ideas.

The re-entrance of Macduff displaying Macbeth’s decapitated head affirms the triumph of the ‘virtuous’ supporters of the exiled Prince of Cumberland, Duncan’s eldest son, Malcolm. This restoration of stability to the chaos of Scotland under thrall to the ‘usurper’, Macbeth offers the audience a grotesque and bloody resolution to five acts of disruption and criminality. No doubt the Jacobean audience would have recognised the resolution as a welcome release from the terror that Macbeth had inflicted so unlawfully and wantonly on Scotland. The fact that Macduff is the executioner validates the idea of the necessary cleansing of the malign Macbeth, despite the repetition of another act of regicide in the play. This regicide is lawful as Macbeth has usurped the divine right of Kings in his brutal and cowardly murder of Duncan. Macduff kills the King to revenge the murder of his family rather than to gain power. Macduff is palpably not Macbeth.

Interestingly, however, Macbeth’s death deprives the play of its imaginatively compelling heart. Who can possibly replace the visionary quality of Macbeth’s despairingly nihilistic ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech which the audience may reluctantly recognise gives sensitive expression to emotions so very much like our own? If Macbeth is only a usurper, then how can he articulate the intense feelings of grief and loneliness so accurately that we feel he is almost speaking on our behalf? Can Macbeth be dismissive as beyond redemption if he still retains vestiges of a human being all too aware of the loneliness of the human condition?

Yet here Macduff’s greeting to Malcolm raises the audience’s hopes for a better future, for the restoration of equilibrium to his ravaged Scotland. But where have we heard such a greeting before? Where has the salutation, ‘Hail’ been spoken earlier in the play and who by? Uncomfortably the answer transports us back to Act One, with the witches. They greeted Macbeth( and Banquo ) in a very similar way so that the audience might recognise the salutation as an uneasy repetition that might( like the ‘fair is foul’ contamination in Macbeth’s opening declaration) suggest the witches have the power to infiltrate language itself. The witches use human beings as vehicles for ventriloquism, speaking in their malign tongues without their knowing.  And if they are still actively toying with the human world, then who might be their next victim or instrument with Macbeth and his wife now destroyed? I would suggest that if we pursue this reading, we might come to the conclusion that having wearied of the progressive ruination of Macbeth, the witches might now have turned their energies to Malcolm and that the salutations acknowledging Malcolm’s Kingship could lead to a deadly pride on the latter’s part and perhaps even the intervention in some way of  Banquo’s still -alive son, Fleance, who the witches promised would ascend to the Scottish throne. It is certainly an uneasy possibility and the audience is acutely aware that the witches have the power to remain hidden from human view until it suits them to manifest themselves.