The Difference Between Macbeth and Richard the Third

By George F. Held

This essay forms Chapter 5 of my ebook: A Christian Pattern In Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, available at Lulu. It argues that Macbeth and Richard III are less similar than many think. An ambitious person is someone for whom the possession of the ancillary ends of prestige, authority, power and/or fame leads directly to the obtainment of the final end, happiness; for him the possession of these ancillary ends therefore is a means to the final end, happiness, not a means to another ancillary end. Richard and Macbeth are not ambitious in this sense of the term. Both want to be king and act upon this desire. Both are like an ambitious person in that both desire and seek power, but neither qualifies as ambitious because neither is so constituted as to find happiness in the possession of power and each fails to satisfy one other criterion stipulated by the above definition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312154377

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The Difference Between Macbeth and Richard the Third

The Difference Between Macbeth and Richard the Third

By

George F. Held

Preface

This essay forms Chapter 5 of my ebook: A Christian Pattern in Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, available at Lulu. That ebook is an expanded version of my book: The Good That Lives After Them: A Pattern in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1995). What is new in the ebook is two chapters on Othello and two addenda to the chapter on Hamlet. I plan to make all the chapters of the ebook available online at Lulu for free as separate essays. If you find this essay to be of interest, you might express your appreciation for it by purchasing at Lulu the ebook of which it forms a part.

The Difference Between Macbeth and Richard III

Ambition

Now let us consider the question of whether Macbeth is ambitious. Rabkin has argued that Macbeth’s motives for regicide are like those of Richard III: both are parricidal, and Macbeth is oedipal (107-09); neither is ambitious:

[Richard] is motivated not by the prize at the end but by the journey itself. . . . Richard kills his family not be­cause he wants to be king but be­cause he wants to kill his family. . . . Richard spends precisely one and one-half lines of blank verse celebrating his victory [IV.ii.3-4] before he acknowl­edges what he has not allowed himself to think before: that he has en­trapped himself, that after such a rise there is only the impossi­bility of holding and enjoying power. (95-96)

Only Richard’s pleasure and Shakespeare’s not yet fully realized power differentiate Richard essen­tially from Macbeth. . . . As in Richard III, so in Macbeth one can point to no single moment when the hero seems able to enjoy the sweet fruition of an early crown. But in Macbeth, more clearly than in Richard III, the regicide’s lack of pleasure in his accomplishments is presented not moralistical­ly, as a judgment on evil deeds, but as a defining fact of the deeds themselves. For if Richard at least enjoys the process of manipula­tion and mur­der by which he gets where he finally does not want to be, Macbeth’s response to his own action is constantly one of horror. As has repeatedly been noticed, he does what he does, not as his wife would do it, willingly in a clear cause, but as if he must do what he does not want to do, and for causes he cannot enunciate. . . . it is Lady Macbeth, never her husband, who speaks of the golden round (I.v.28). It is she, not he, who claims that he wants to have what he esteems the ornament of life. Macbeth, in response, suggests that his own concern is rather with what may become a man and with the knowledge that to do what she suggests is to deny or to destroy his own manhood (I.vii.41-47). With singular consistency, in fact, Shakespeare denies Macbeth even a single line that indicates ambition as the spring of his action. (102)

Rabkin recognizes that several passages may seem to contradict the purport of the last sentence, but maintains that nowhere do we see Macbeth in a moment of unequivocal ambition; that is, there is always something equivocal in the words which he uses to express his ambitious desires. For example, he asserts that his only motive is Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, / And falls on th’ other— (I.vii.25-28). But this image, as Rabkin notes, presents ambition as something rising only to fall, as self-destructive and doomed to failure. Macbeth’s phrase: the swelling act / Of the imperial theme (I.iii.128-29) is extraordinarily vague, scarcely focused on the pleasures of being king, and it is followed immediately by lines that seem to express premature remorse for an evil deed not yet fully imagined. Macbeth’s letter to his wife concerning the witches’ prophecy "speaks only ‘of what greatness is promis’d thee’ (I.v.12-13). When he sees the spirit of Banquo wearing a crown, his remark: Thy crown does sere my eyeballs" (IV.i.112-13), suggests that a crown is something to be avoided, not sought (Rabkin 156n47).

To the number of these equivocal passages I would add one not mentioned by Rabkin:

If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly. If th’ assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease, success; that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,

But here, upon this bank and [shoal] of time,

We’ld jump the life to come. (I.vii.1-7)

These lines contain two conditional sentences of which the protases are similar: both hypothesize the successful commission of the regicide. In both cases Macbeth might have gone on in the apodoses to describe the benefits to be gained from kingship. There is, I think, the expectation that he will do so. This expectation is especially strong in the case of the second sentence because it is the second such sentence and because the crescendo of its long protasis seems to demand something distinctly positive as its climax. But the apodoses in this regard are both disappointing. The first: then ’twere well / It were done quickly is merely neutral: it says nothing at all about such benefits; and the second: We’ld jump the life to come is in fact negative. It is as if Macbeth is at a loss to imagine what positive personal consequences might result from the regicide, and can only envision a negative and undesirable one, the loss of eternal salvation. By the apodosis of the second sentence Macbeth of course implies that the benefits to be derived from kingship are so great that for their sake he would willingly sacrifice eternal salvation, but by failing to reveal the nature of these benefits his words create the effect I have described. I recognize that the mention of time at the end of the protasis leads naturally to a reference to eternity in the apodosis and that this somewhat softens the effect I have described. It does not, however, undo it.

Equivocal expressions of ambition are nevertheless still expres­sions of ambition; and Rabkin goes too far in denying ambition to Macbeth. His comment on Macbeth’s letter, moreover, is not quite accurate. The words he cites are not the only reference in the letter to greatness, for Macbeth therein addresses his wife as "my dearest partner of greatness (I.v.11). This manner of address implies his own share of and desire for greatness as well as hers. The letter therefore at least implicitly speaks of what greatness is promis’d him, not just her. That Macbeth desires greatness, moreover, is brought out by his reaction to the witches’ prophecies. Banquo twice describes him as being on that occasion rapt (I.iii.57, 142); and Macbeth employs this same word in his letter to describe his reaction to them: I stood rapt in the wonder of it (I.iii.6). In that letter he also says that he burnt in desire to question them further (I.v.4): his burning desire to question the witches implies his desire to be king. However complex the psychological reasons for his reaction to the witches’ prophecies, his reaction certainly has the effect of character­izing him as possessing a strong desire for greatness" and kingship. His characterization prior to the regicide, therefore, seems to me irrecon­cilable with the theory that it is merely or chiefly parricidal tendencies which lead him to commit regicide. Such tendencies may help him to overcome the normal reluctance to shed the blood of one’s king—when he is on the very point of killing his, and they may help to explain the pointless bloodshed in which he later indulges, but the play, by displaying well in advance of the act of regicide Macbeth’s fascination with kingship, makes clear that what brings him to the point of performing that act is not such tendencies but rather a genuine desire to be king.

Rabkin’s analysis therefore does not do justice to the differences between Macbeth and Richard III. They differ not just in respect to the degree of pleasure which they display in