are all out’ (2.1.

4–5), says Banquo, fancifully – and unconsciously reminds us of the obscuring of Heaven
and starlight for which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have wished.

Now, in this deep darkness, characters cannot see each other even by the light of torches. ‘Who’s there?’
asks Banquo as Macbeth enters with a torch-bearing servant (2.1.10). It is the same nervous exclamation
as begins Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and as in the first scene of that play, which begins in darkness on the
battlements of Elsinore, the audience at the Globe would have been able to see very clearly how the
characters on stage were unable to see clearly. A little later, after Banquo has retired, Lady Macbeth enters
and catches herself starting at the shriek of an owl, just before her husband comes to meet her. ‘Who’s
there? What ho?’ (2.2.8) asks Macbeth, and at first she hardly seems to recognise him: ‘My husband!’
(2.2.13). Their dialogue creates a darkness in which sounds and apprehensions are amplified: ‘Didst thou
not hear a noise?’ (2.2.14), ‘Did not you speak?’ (2.2.16). The terrible deed has been done and the
darkness that made it possible concentrates their fears.

The discovery of Duncan’s murder is followed by an odd little scene, which must take place several days
later, in which Ross and an Old Man discuss unnatural events that seem to have accompanied the killing.
Shakespeare takes from his source story in Holinshed’s Chronicles the report that after Donwald murdered
King Duff ‘For the space of six monenths together ... there appeered no sunne by day, nor moone by night
in anie part of the realme’. In the wake of Duncan’s killing, darkness appears to have seeped from the night
into the day. ‘By th’ clock ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp’ (2.4.6–7), observes
Ross. Without any help from artificial lighting effects, we gain an impression of ‘night’s predominance’
(2.4.8), as he calls it.

When we return to Macbeth he has been crowned king but fears Banquo and ‘his royalty of nature’ (3.1.49).
He must again call darkness to his aid. Banquo tells him that he is riding out and will probably be ‘a
borrower of the night / For a dark hour or twain’ (3.1.26–27) before he returns for Macbeth’s feast. Night
will, of course, facilitate the arrangement of his murder, and when Macbeth instructs the two Murderers on
their mission, he echoes Banquo’s own phrasing. Fleance, he tells the hired killers, must ‘embrace the fate
/ Of that dark hour’ (3.1.136–37). As so often in this play, darkness is simultaneously metaphorical and
literal. The ‘dark hour’ is the time of killing – but also the lightless time when a trap can be sprung. When
the Murderers attack Banquo, it is darkness that allows them to surprise him – but also that allows Fleance
to escape. ‘Who did strike out the light?’ asks the Third Murderer (3.3.19). Darkness is not the friend to
Macbeth that he believes. Fate is not his to command.

Darkness may seem to become Macbeth’s element, but his wife, once the prime mover of their plots,
comes to dread it. Watching her sleepwalking, her Gentlewoman tells the Doctor that ‘she has light by her
continually, ’tis her command’ (5.1.22). ‘Enter Lady with a Taper’ is the stage instruction in the First Folio,
on which text all later editions are based. The taper, the smallest kind of candle, is Lady Macbeth’s
safeguard against the powers of darkness. These were once the powers that she invoked, but now they
crowd in on her. Once she called ‘Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell’ (1.5.50–
51); now she feels and fears ‘Hell is murky’ (5.1.36). In her final scene before her death, Shakespeare
shows how the horror of her deeds has possessed her, and does so by dramatising the most elemental and
childlike of fears: fear of the dark.
 2) Manhood and the ‘milk of human kindness’ in Macbeth

The tragedy of Macbeth revolves around the question of what it means to be a man, argues Kiernan
Ryan.

‘I pray you remember the porter’ (2.3.20–21)

Macbeth is the tragedy of a man torn apart and destroyed by the conflicting conceptions of masculinity at
war within him. But it’s also a tragedy that glimpses beyond that conflict the prospect of humanity’s
liberation from the destructive male fantasies that still plague it and threaten its survival.

In case the play’s obsession with manhood escapes us, Shakespeare enlists that scurrilous wise fool the
Porter to bring it into focus. In the immediate aftermath of Duncan’s murder and its traumatic impact on
Macbeth, as the dreadful knocking at the gate subsides, the self-styled ‘porter of Hell Gate’ (2.3.2) treats
Macduff to an incongruous comic lecture on the fate booze has in store for the sexually aroused male:
Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand too;
in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him. (2.3.29–36)

But on closer inspection the Porter’s lewd gag turns out to be anything but incongruous. What it provides, in
the guise of light relief from the tension of the preceding scenes, is a vulgar comic version of Macbeth’s
tragic plight. In a sly plebeian parody of the play’s ‘imperial theme’ (1.3.129) Macbeth’s disabling agonies of
conscience before and after killing his king are reduced to the embarrassment of impotent lust. This covert
caricature of Macbeth’s ‘Thriftless ambition’ (2.4.28), which fails to be satisfied by regicide, as a failure to
translate desire into deed by maintaining an erection, pinpoints what’s ultimately at stake in this tragedy:
male power and masculinity itself.

It’s no accident, moreover, that the words ‘equivocator’ and ‘equivocate’, on which the Porter harps, are
echoed on the brink of doom by Macbeth, as he beholds Birnam Wood marching, unbelievably, towards
him and begins ‘To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth’ (5.5.42–43). That echo recalls the
disparaging context in which the Porter uses these words to caricature his master’s predicament. But it also
links the Porter to the Weird Sisters, the source of the fiendish equivocation that dupes Macbeth. And they
prove equally adept at underscoring the crucial part played by gender in forging his fate.

‘Secret, black, and midnight hags’

When Macbeth and Banquo first encounter ‘these juggling fiends’ that ‘palter with us in a double sense, /
That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope’ (5.8.19–22), Banquo is struck by their
unearthly, androgynous appearance: ‘You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret /
That you are so’ (1.3.45–47). Unfortunately, few productions of Macbeth have portrayed the three witches
as they were plainly meant to be portrayed, because few productions have grasped the significance of their
androgyny. The effect of their embodying on stage a sexual identity which is neither male nor female but
physically ambiguous should be to highlight, by their stark visual contrast with the virile warrior Macbeth,
the rigid gender role by which he is fatally ‘cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in’ (3.4.23).

But it’s not just the androgyny of the ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’ (4.1.48) that throws the masculine
contours of Macbeth’s tragedy into relief. It’s also the uncanny way they anticipate his aspirations and
anxieties, which are the products of the martial culture that moulded him. It’s important to stress that
Macbeth’s fate is not dictated by the witches. None of the malign spells cast by the bearded handmaids of
Hecat, as they dance round their bubbling cauldron with its gruesome ingredients, has any power over
Macbeth. The Weird Sisters ‘can look into the seeds of time’ (1.3.58) and foretell his future in deceitful
language, whose full meaning emerges only in retrospect. But they can’t compel Macbeth to do anything.

Shakespeare makes that clear from the outset, when the grim trio greets Macbeth with titles he has yet to
acquire, and Banquo sees him ‘start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair’, and then become
strangely ‘rapt withal’ (1.3.51–2, 57). Before the scene is over, Macbeth’s first soliloquy leaves us in no
doubt that what has startled and struck fear into him is the witches’ open voicing of the ‘black and deep
desires’ (1.4.51) already brewing secretly in his heart. Like the spirits that Lady Macbeth commands in the
next scene to ‘unsex’ her and purge her of compassion, the witches ‘tend on mortal thoughts’ (1.5.41; my
emphasis): they serve the evil thoughts they find in mortal minds, they don’t plant them there.
‘All that may become a man’

The Weird Sisters collude with the Porter to focus our attention on the violently opposed models of
manhood fighting for control of Macbeth’s heart and mind. But even without their help the play’s constant
wrestling with the nature of masculinity, and with what being a man demands, would be hard to miss. When
Lady Macbeth begs the forces of darkness to ‘unsex’ her, it’s because she wants to be drained of the
tender, nurturing qualities conventionally regarded as feminine, and filled ‘from the crown to the toe top-full /
Of direst cruelty!’ (1.5.42–43), so as to be equal to the lethal man’s work that lies before them. ‘We are
men, my liege’, protest the murderers hired to slay Banquo, when Macbeth questions their commitment to
the deed. ‘Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,’ retorts Macbeth, ‘As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels,
spaniels, curs . . . are clept / All by the name of dogs’; and he keeps testing their calibre until he’s satisfied
that they belong ‘Not i’ th’ worst rank of manhood’ (3.1.90–94, 102). The contrast with the later, moving
exchange between Malcolm and Macduff, when the latter learns that his wife and children have been
slaughtered by Macbeth’s henchmen, could scarcely be sharper. ‘What, all my pretty chickens, and their
dam, / At one fell swoop?’ Macduff asks. ‘Dispute it like a man’, urges Malcolm. ‘I shall do so’, replies
Macduff, ‘But I must also feel it as a man’ (4.3.218–21).

It’s the running battle between the Macbeths, however, that puts the key to the tragedy beyond question. It
begins in the electrifying last scene of Act 1, when Lady Macbeth sneers at her husband’s reluctance to
proceed with Duncan’s murder, casting doubt on his courage and virility. ‘I dare do all that may become a
man. / Who dares do more is none’, Macbeth declares. To which Lady Macbeth responds:

What beast was’t then

That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. (1.7.46–51)

Lady Macbeth emerges victorious from this opening skirmish, and Macbeth applauds her exemplary
resolution in the same terms as their argument: ‘Bring forth men-children only! / For thy undaunted mettle
should compose / Nothing but males’ (1.7.72–74). But the same quarrel flares up again when the ghost of
Banquo appears to the horrified Macbeth as he hosts a royal banquet. ‘Are you a man?’ demands Lady
Macbeth, oblivious of the spectre and appalled by her newly crowned husband’s public fit of terror: ‘What,
quite unmanned in folly?’ (3.4.57, 72). Macbeth eventually recovers his nerve, directly echoing their earlier
dispute as he insists ‘What man dare, I dare’, and at last succeeds in banishing the ghost that threatened to
make him seem ‘The baby of a girl’ (3.4.98, 105). ‘Why, so’, he sighs with relief as the phantom vanishes,
‘being gone, / I am a man again’ (3.4.106–7).

‘Pity, like a naked new-born babe’

What is Shakespeare’s dramatizing through this debate about manliness? It’s the deadly antagonism
between Macbeth’s feudal obligations as a nobleman to his king, ‘The Lord’s anointed temple’, whose ‘Most
sacrilegious murder’ will make ‘a breach in nature’ (2.3.67–8, 113), and the ruthless demands of ‘vaulting
ambition’ (1.7.27), which find such a formidable advocate in his wife. Macbeth finally succumbs to those
demands and embraces the creed of selfish individualism to which most societies remain in thrall: ‘For mine
own good / All causes shall give way’ (3.4.134–35). To conform to his wife’s masculine ideal and be the
kind of man who seizes outright everything he wants, whatever it takes and whatever the consequences,
he assassinates the monarch to whom he has pledged absolute allegiance. But Macbeth’s tragedy does
not lie in the fact that by so doing he has violated the sacred and secular laws of feudal society. If that were
the case, the play would boil down in the end to a politically orthodox morality play, depicting the just fate
that awaits regicidal tyrants, and leaving us satisfied that ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’
(5.9.35) got exactly what they deserved. The reason why it doesn’t boil down to that, and why we’re left
feeling something more complex and profound, is that Macbeth’s tragedy lies in his betrayal of the new kind
of man that murder awakens within him, and that he might well have become, had he dwelt in another time
and in another kind of world.

Lady Macbeth reveals the source of the potential self her husband harbours, when she voices her fear that
Macbeth is not the stuff of which callous killers are made, because he is ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human
kindness / To catch the nearest way’ (1.5.17). The phrase ‘th’ milk of human kindness’, in its full early
modern meaning, denotes a benign, compassionate attitude to one’s fellow human beings, and an
awareness of the obligations that follow from feeling kinship with one’s kind. This ideal finds its most vivid
expression in the stunning soliloquy in which Macbeth reviews the arguments against murdering Duncan.
None of the standard moral objections or prospects of retribution are strong enough to deter him. The only
thing that stops him in his tracks is his terror lest

pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.21–25)

What’s so striking is that Macbeth is daunted not by the fact that his victim is his divinely ordained king, but
by his dread of incurring the apocalyptic wrath of ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe’. Nor is that any wonder,
given his being ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ and thus innately disposed to feel pity himself. For
the image of vulnerable infancy evoked by Macbeth enshrines a fundamental moral code which overrides
all others. It’s a moral code whose power lies in the knowledge that the claims of other human beings on
one’s kindness are as incontestable and compelling as those of ‘a naked new-born babe’, regardless of its
gender, race or rank.

‘Blood will have blood’

Hence Macbeth’s immediate fear after murdering Duncan is not that he now bears the guilt of regicide, of
having betrayed ‘The service and the loyalty’ that he owed his sovereign’s ‘throne and state’ (1.4.22, 25) as
‘his kinsman and his subject’ (1.7.13). He’s terrified by the thought that he ‘hath murdered sleep’ (2.2.39),
which Lady Macbeth calls ‘the season of all natures’ (3.4.140), because by destroying the release from
anguish that sleep offers all human beings, he has severed himself from humanity. Hence, too, the
obsession of both Macbeth and his wife with having shed blood – not the royal blood of the monarch as
such, but the vital fluid that flows through the veins of kings and commoners alike, and which exerts its own
moral authority, irrespective of the rank of the person whose blood has been spilled: ‘It will have blood, they
say; blood will have blood’ (3.4.121). When the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth recalls Duncan, as she
frantically strives to wash her hands clean of their crime, his royalty has been wiped from her mind as
irrelevant, because it’s not the fact that he was royal that matters: ‘Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him?’ (5.1.39–40; my emphasis).

The prophetic moral vision implicit in such potent imagery ̶ a vision rooted in what human beings have in
common rather than what sets them at each other’s throats ̶ still awaits in our blood-stained world a future
in which it can find a home. In the meantime it affords us the true measure of Macbeth, whose crime was to
assassinate the king, but whose tragedy was that he killed one of his own kind and wound up butchering
his way to oblivion, despite the human kindness in his heart.