On the question of agency in Macbeth by Shakespeare

I recently listened to the Macbeth episode from the Approaching Shakespeare series, and Emma Smith brought up several interesting points. Before I listened to this episode, I had already formed quite an opinion on the question of agency in Macbeth—precisely that Macbeth exercised great agency in killing Duncan, and that his agency can be seen as a form of emancipation from a world weighed heavy with ideals of divine rights and public esteem. I must concede that David Blair's What happens in 'Macbeth' Act I scene VII shaped the bulk of my stance on the subject. That said, Smith's talk on the matter has made me reflect on certain aspects of my interpretations. So, I thought it would be interesting to present some of the points that speak to me from the two sources, placing them in a dialogue manner. 

Blair starts out with a commentary on a specific choice of the word 'and' in the last sentence of Lady Macbeth's little attack on Macbeth for backtracking on his promise to kill Duncan (act I scene VII): 

 

"Would'st thou have that/Which thou esteems't the ornament of life,/And live a coward in thine own esteem"

If she is trying to illustrate two parallel, yet distinct, futures that will dawn on Macbeth based on his decision regarding Duncan, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to replace 'and' with 'or'? This may seem nitpicky at first, since most readers understand what Lady Macbeth is implying here: Macbeth has to choose between getting the crown or living as a coward knowing he did not chase after it. Still, it is important to question the peculiarity of the authorial choice here; wouldn't it have been easier for Shakespeare to use 'or' if that is the intended message? Looking into the 'and' could "challenge not just the received interpretation of this speech," Blair asserts, "but received interpretations of the play." 

Taking the 'and' seriously, we see how Lady Macbeth proposes a future where her husband can "have the crown while at the same time despising himself as cowardly." This goes against the (superficial) logic of what she meant—that Macbeth can be king or a coward; counter-intuitvely, she asks whether Macbeth wants to be king and a coward. The significance of the latter interpretation is that "she is postulating a situation in which the attainment of the crown might occur but without Macbeth having exercised his 'own act and valour' to achieve it." Blair goes on to suggest that "the foretelling [of the crown] is the nub of the play not because it plants in Macbeth's mind the idea of murdering Duncan but because it makes it feasible that the crown could be achieved without murdering him." When Macbeth says "We will proceed no further in this business," he is not abandoning the ambition of becoming King, but only giving up his agency to allow Chance to work in its mysterious way to get him the crown. Lady Macbeth's speech criticizes Macbeth for giving up on his own agency to achieve what he desires, not for giving up on that desire itself. From this, the play is fixated on the idea of activity vs. passivity; self-determination, not ambition, forms the core of agency in the tragedy. 

Smith did not touch on this minute detail and did not get to consider the main dilemma as that of approbation of the self-self vs. the public-self, although this conclusion could be arrived at without picking up the 'and'. The podcast episode, for the most part, hovers around the discussion of which element—of the supernatural, the self, the other—dominates the area of agency. Smith claims that while all of these sources of agency are shown in the play, Shakespeare leaves the question itself unanswered.

To be seen as worthy, as 'valiant cousin! worthy gentleman', Macbeth must give up on his desire for active determination.  The ethical question is bound to this. Smith sees the question of agency as quite a linear path in my opinion, where her equivocation of human agency = responsibility = punishment to me indicates that the search is indeed for one (or multiple) perpetrator(s), and not an investigation into the origin of that agency (or lack thereof). This is not a bad thing, just very different objectives that the two sources are seeking (it does kind of make it harder for them to be in dialogue but oh well). 

Where the two do merge and offer some semblance of a dialogue is in regards to the ending scenes of the play. Blair sees the speech "as the speech of someone who has abandoned any faith in his ability to determine his own history: trees don't move, all men are born of woman, and there is nothing much to get up for in the morning—the player struts and frets but is not the author of his part." The last few words ("not the author of his part") are strikingly similar to what Smith mentions, albeit in passing: the audience's expectations of a tragedy, and the tragic hero archetype, shaping and warping Macbeth's sense of agency. Could his decision to fight on, and not surrender, starkly contrast the tone of his 'tomorrow' speech? Is this change shaped by the type of character he is, and not by his own will and self-determination? Is Macbeth then directly addressing the audience in the last line of his soliloquy, somehow conscious of himself on that stage, a "poor player" that literally "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" not only because of his paranoia but because he is somehow aware of the path he is forced to take into the end of his life, not as an act of surrendering, but in the violent and tragic act of fighting on?

Back to Blair's notes, he writes that the implication of the 'self-esteem vs. public esteem' interpretation is that the "witches actually tempt Macbeth not to murder Duncan by offering him a passive and determined route to the throne." Thus, the play is far from being one about the delicate balance between good and evil rooted in ambition. This conflict is what is displayed in Macbeth's act I scene VII soliloquy, where the question of (in)action exists in the realm of judgement, not in the afterlife, but "here, upon this bank and shoal of time". It is the possible condemnation from his peers, expressed in the form of "a reciprocal act of violence sanctioned officially or unofficially by 'even-handed Justice." Back in the above excerpt, the 'ornament of life' is, contrary to popular beliefs, not the crown, but "golden opinion, the glossy cloak of public esteem." Lady Macbeth hence raises the (depressing) possibility of appealing to the esteem of others as worthless when self-approbation fails. "In this reading 'and' is entirely natural: would he want the public approbation which he craves while at the same time accusing himself privately of pusillanimity, having procured it by failing in this instance to act?" Again, it is difficult to see how Smith would respond to this point, as she discusses the role of the witches in terms of intensity and magnitude, not in terms of purpose. But adopting Smith's lens, here it could be said that the witches' influence did little to deter Macbeth, especially not when his wife was chastising him with the valour of her tongue. 

Another 'revelation' that I made whilst listening to Smith's podcast episode was the tension between sovereignty, tied to natural laws and the supernatural, and power, tied to violence and human agency. Smith is able to integrate the supernatural into the worldbuilding itself, whereas I find myself viewing it as a detachable fantasy element. However, I think that this difference can be reconciled with, where the metaphysical Jacobean beliefs that shroud kingship in a divinity expressible only as "the Lord's anointed temple" veils the brutal material reality of power in this society: a power only attainable, and maintainable through bloodshed, through human agency. In a way, Shakespeare presents this landscape in the first two scenes of the play. In the infamous act I scene I, the witches are speaking ominously about a war, seemingly aware of its results, though they are not revealed (they also planned to meet Macbeth...). In the next scene, the Captain details how Macbeth and Banquo battled against Fate to achieve victory, the language of agency shining through: "carved out his passage," "till he unseamed him from the nave to the chops," "they meant to bathe in reeking wounds or memorize another Golgotha." If Fate is tied to the witches, that is, they have the power to contort it, was the victory one that took place despite fate, despite the witches power? Could this be an alternative reason as to why the witches planned on seeing Macbeth, aware that his sense of agency is powerful enough to overturn Fate? This interpretation fits nicely with Blair's suggestion that the witches' prophecy to Macbeth was in the hope of deterring him from using his agency to get the crown. 

Nevertheless, on this spectrum we have the status quo justified as part of nature, while on the other hand we witness how power is achieved by the human will. It is the murder of Duncan that brings this tension to a climax, where the active determination of Macbeth to gain power reveals the divine rights of king to be penetrable (at first I wrote 'unnatural' but then remembered the chaotic description of nature turning inside out the night of the murder), that one indeed does not have to be divinely ordained for kingship. Now, although it is quite ironic to say that Macbeth as a character symbolizes a radical ideal, it is not totally wrong in my opinion to claim that his actions demonstrate that the 'reality' that you live under is most likely not real at all; it is not inevitable, but molded, and therefore destroyable, by human agency.