Now, of course, there's a movie coming out. And make no doubt about it, the movie -- like the play -- asks some fairly important spiritual questions: What if nightmares, and not the waking world, were real? What if the truth of human nature were seen not in love but in madness and murder? What if the love-instinct itself were only an instrument of a deeper, murderous instinct?
One literary critic has called Macbeth "a moral play par excellence". No, no it's not. Macbeth isn't a moral play. It's a metaphysical play. In Macbeth, nightmare and murder are elevated to the level of transcendent realities. In an otherwise excellent review of the new film, Travis LaCouter wants to draw edifying conclusions from the play's "strong moral warning". But that's a mistake. The only way to respond morally to the nightmare world of Macbeth would be to despair and die. The moral answer to Macbeth, in other words, is Nietzsche.
That's why Macbeth can never captivate the Christian spiritual imagination.
Christians know that evil is a privation -- it's the absence of the good. Macbeth is about positive evil. Its theme is murder as a manifestation of positive evil. In the play, evil exists. It extends itself. It grows. It devours the good. It has a horrible "generative" quality (as LaCouter nicely puts it in the same review). It's not like ordinary darkness -- a privation of light -- but like a vacuum that can suck the light out of a room, leaving the human heart blinded and confused.
That's why I think The Tempest is, of all the Bard's play, the most Christian. It shows what life with God is like. Even King Lear depicts what life with God is like for those in the midst of the burning, purgative fire that is spoken so often in Scripture. But here's the thing: Macbeth cannot be likened to hell. It's so entirely unlike the Christian hell.
Witness Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton's Satan is a notoriously lovable character because his vices are so recognizably human: Pride, ingratitude, a "sense of injured merit", an incorrigible independence of spirit (a la Augustine). He is cast into darkness but he continues to glow with a residual spiritual light, a tragic but also fundamentally charming reminder of his created status as an angel of God. The weird sisters in Macbeth are not former angels. They are not creatures fallen from grace. They are agents of a positive evil. They shine, so to speak, with an uncreated spiritual darkness. Faced with them, one would turn and run for refuge into the arms of Milton's Satan. At least the latter is part of creation. At least he stands in some relation to God. Not true for those weird sisters.
Lady Macbeth is the most disturbing character in literature precisely because in her the maternal instinct and the murder instinct are united. She would sooner dash the brains out of her suckling infant than to see her husband draw back from murder at the appointed hour: And she not only feels this, but confides it to her husband. In Lady Macbeth, the instinct to destroy life is stronger than the instinct to engender it. When the Greek heroine Medea is abandoned by her husband, she avenges herself by murdering her (i.e., his) own children: She does evil for the sake of love. But it's very different with Lady Macbeth, who seems to love for the sake of evil. Forced to choose between having Medea for a mother or Lady Macbeth, I would take my chances with Medea. She has human instincts at least. Better to be killed for love than to be loved for the sake of evil.
Does good triumph over evil in the end? In the last act, the castle is conquered and Macbeth is justly killed. But this limited theodicy has to be set within the wider metaphysical frame. The weird sisters have prophesied Macbeth's rise to power and have riddled his downfall. Everything happens just as they have foretold. Everything goes exactly according to plan. For all we know, the triumph of Malcolm and Macduff might be the transition to even greater evils, the next necessary step in Evil's ineluctable advance.
If forced, I'd rather Shakespeare's history plays were more true, more real, than Macbeth. In Shakespeare's history plays, the endless cycle of the rise and fall of kings is shown to be meaningless: Power is meaningless. In Macbeth, one perceives with horror that the cycle of power is not meaningless after all but is evidence of a cruel and malignant design, a sort of inverted providence. In King Lear, the cycle of power is seen to be redeemable: The exquisite vision of Lear and Cordelia singing like two birds in a cage as they lovingly, lazily discuss the rise and fall of the mighty. At that fleeting moment, just before Cordelia is killed and Lear dies of grief, the cycle of power is glimpsed from a redeemed perspective. It has become an affectionate plaything, material for loving conversation between a father (once a king) and a daughter (once estranged). History, in itself, is still meaningless but it has been marked by love.
Here's my problem: You can't project the redemptive vision of Lear onto Macbeth. Because my real fear about Macbeth is quite simple: I'm not worried that history will turn out meaningless (as in the history plays). I'm worried that history will turn out to be designed -- by Evil.
This is why I insist that if Christians are going to claim any lessons of morality out of Shakespeare, don't look to Macbeth. Look to The Tempest. If the Christian proclamation is true, then the final truth of things will be the marriage festivities of Ferdinand and Miranda, and the eternal joy of Ariel who sings forever within the tiny folds of a flower. If Christianity is not true, then the best thing that could happen would be to discover that Shakespeare's history plays were true, and that history is merely meaningless. The worst that could happen would be if Macbeth were true, and what we had mistaken for meaninglessness were actually the cunning designs of murdering spirits who toy with human lives for reasons that we can never guess. Or, more likely, for no reason at all -- for there is no reason in a nightmare.
See, this is the choice the early Christians made between the gods of ancient Greece and Rome and the God and Father of Jesus Christ. It's what made Stoicism and Epicureanism so patently false. All of those would find good news in the telling of the story of Macbeth. Not Christians. We can only be comfortable with King Lear or The Tempest.