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Unit 6: Macbeth—Concept of Tragedy of Aristotle and its Application on Macbeth, Poetic Tragedy and Motifs

6.1.2 Tragedy of Moral Order Notes
The disastrous consequences of Macbeth’s ambition are not limited to him. Almost from the moment
of the murder, the play depicts Scotland as a land shaken by inversions of the natural order.
Shakespeare may have intended a reference to the great chain of being, although the play’s images
of disorder are mostly not specific enough to support detailed intellectual readings. He may also
have intended an elaborate compliment to James’s belief in the divine right of kings, although this
hypothesis, outlined at greatest length by Henry N. Paul, is not universally accepted. As in Julius
Caesar, though, perturbations in the political sphere are echoed and even amplified by events in the
material world. Among the most often depicted of the inversions of the natural order is sleep.
Macbeth’s announcement that he has “murdered sleep” is figuratively mirrored in Lady Macbeth’s
sleepwalking.
Macbeth’s generally accepted indebtedness to medieval tragedy is often seen as significant in the
play’s treatment of moral order. Glynne Wickham connects the play, through the Porter, to a mystery
play on the harrowing of hell. Howard Felperin argues that the play has a more complex attitude
toward “orthodox Christian tragedy” than is often admitted; he sees a kinship between the play
and the tyrant plays within the medieval liturgical drama.
The theme of androgyny is often seen as a special aspect of the theme of disorder. Inversion of
normative gender roles is most famously associated with the witches and with Lady Macbeth as she
appears in the first act. Whatever Shakespeare’s degree of sympathy with such inversions, the play
ends with a thorough return to normative gender values. Some feminist psychoanalytic critics,
such as Janet Adelman, have connected the play’s treatment of gender roles to its larger theme of
inverted natural order. In this light, Macbeth is punished for his violation of the moral order by
being removed from the cycles of nature (which are figured as female); nature itself (as embodied in
the movement of Birnam Wood) is part of the restoration of moral order.

6.1.3 Poetic Tragedy

Critics in the early twentieth century reacted against what they saw as an excessive dependence on
the study of character in criticism of the play. This dependence, though most closely associated
with Andrew Cecil Bradley, is clear as early as the time of Mary Cowden Clarke, who offered
precise, if fanciful, accounts of the predramatic lives of Shakespeare’s female leads. She suggested,
for instance, that the child Lady Macbeth refers to in the first act died during a foolish military
action.

Witchcraft and Evil
In the play, the Three Witches represent darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents
and witnesses. Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During Shakespeare’s
day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, “the most notorious traitor and rebell that can be.”
They were not only political traitors, but spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs
from them comes from their ability to straddle the play’s borders between reality and the
supernatural. They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control
fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real
world. The witches’ lines in the first act: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and
filthy air” are often said to set the tone for the rest of the play by establishing a sense of confusion.
Indeed, the play is filled with situations where evil is depicted as good, while good is rendered evil.

The line “Double, double toil and trouble,” often sensationalized to a point that
it loses meaning, communicates the witches’ intent clearly: they seek only trouble
for the mortals around them.

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