Household Words: Macbeth and the Failure of Spectacle

Summary

In her epic novel on the life of Macbeth, King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett suggests that one of the primary reasons for the eventual failure of her hero’s kingship is his inability to be perceived as sufficiently charismatic: ‘a diverse people in time of hardship need a priest-king. The English know that. Edward is anointed with holy oil: he has the power of healing, they say’. Although Dunnett’s Macbeth-figure – an Orkney jarl also known as Thorfinn – is very differently conceived from Shakespeare’s, each shares an unfortunate tendency towards the mundane. Most particularly, Shakespeare’s hero and his wife both, at certain crucial moments of their lives, strongly favour a low-key, occasionally almost bathetic vocabulary. This aspect of their characterization has been much mocked in the English comic and popular tradition: Bertie Wooster is continually amused by the concept of the cat i’ th’ adage, and Edmund Crispin’s irascible literary detective Gervase Fen, Oxford professor, gives the play very short shrift:

'Do!' exclaimed Fen. 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.'

'What is that supposed to mean?'

'It isn't supposed to mean anything. It's a quotation from our great English dramatist, Shakespeare. I sometimes wonder if Hemings and Condell went off the rails a bit there. It's a vile absurd jingle.'

The point was, perhaps, made most strongly, and most elegantly, by Dr Johnson, fulminating on the 'lowness' of the diction in the 'Come, thick night . . . ' speech (though he mistakenly attributes this to Macbeth).