Macbeth's Twist on Nihilism

When rereading Macbeth recently, the first thing that jumped out at me was Macbeth’s imp of the perverse (previous post). The second was Macbeth’s nihilism, which appears early in the play and increases as his doom draws near. Yet the nihilism in Macbeth is no mere dismal pronouncement of life’s meaninglessness.

Surely this celebrated soliloquy is one of the finest nihilistic statements in all of literature:

     Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
     To the last syllable of recorded time,
     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
     The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more. It is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

From the Orson Welles film adaptation:

 

By this point, Macbeth’s life has completely fallen apart. Having attained the throne through murder, he finds himself a despised tyrant holed up in his castle and going mad. His wife and co-conspirator, Lady Macbeth, has committed suicide and he fears his own end draws near. He has played his part, and poorly, and now the curtain falls and he asks, as we all must, “What was the point?”

But here comes the twist. No sooner has Macbeth finished speaking than he learns an army approaches. His clock is up, but instead of further bewailing the dumb machinery of fate, he rouses himself to meet this final challenge on the battlefield:

     I gin to be aweary of the sun,

     And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
     Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
     At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Macbeth’s response to the meaninglessness of the universe is to create meaning through action. This is the kind of nihilism I like, positive nihilism, nihilism which says, along with Nietzsche, “Okay fine, so the universe itself doesn’t hold meaning, then I’ll give it meaning!” This is the heroic tenor par excellence, and indeed these four lines from Macbeth ring like passages from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

     Death closes all: but something ere the end,

     Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
     Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

And this:

     Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Macbeth and Ulysses, murderer and hero, may not be that dissimilar. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom quotes Nietzsche from Daybreak. In characteristic fashion, the philosopher denies the conventional moralistic reading of Macbeth in favor of something bolder and more life-affirming:

He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. . . . How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does [Shakespeare’s] ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime!

This is a tempting interpretation of Macbeth, but let’s face it, it has problems. Macbeth’s pursuit of his course is very much like a rogue’s. He murders his guest and king while he sleeps. Then he hires common cutthroats to kill his dearest friend and friend’s son. I’m judging by conventional standards of morality, but if Macbeth’s behavior isn’t roguish, I don’t know what is. Although Macbeth does begin to stir earlier, it is only after all is lost that he exhibits anything I would say resembles Ulysses’ valiance.

Or rather, exhibits it again. Several lines in Macbeth make it clear that Macbeth was once a good man, a loyal servant to his king, and one hell of a fighter. According to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, the historical Macbeth, who lived from 1040 to 1057, was also a better man than we see throughout most of the play. According to custom in nascent Scotland, there were legitimate reasons for rebelling against one’s king. Macbeth may have felt Duncan was too soft for protecting the land against invasion. Or Lady Macbeth may have had a blood feud with him. In Asimov’s words:

If Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, aspired to the throne, he did so in the approved Scottish fashion of the time. He raised an army and rebelled.

But this is the genius of Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s works can be read numerous ways, the thrust changing with each director, actor and viewer. Henry V has been played as pro-war and anti-war. Coriolanus is either one of Shakespeare’s best or worst. The introduction to my copy of Julius Caesar says that Shakespeare did not try to settle the debate about whether Caesar was a hero or a tyrant and his assassins heroes or villains. Shakespeare raises questions but only toys with answers.

And so it goes with Macbeth. Does the Scottish king’s nihilism reject or affirm life? I’ve provided some thoughts on the matter, but the only way you can answer that question is by engaging with the text yourself.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)

Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?