Sunday Morning! “The Tragedy of Macbeth” by William Shakespeare

She says of her husband:

Thou wouldst be great; Art not with ambition, but without The illness should attend it.

At some point, our understanding of “ambition” seems to have changed over the years: from a common human weakness that can drive us to great acts of vice and violence, to a sort of unambiguously affirmative life drive. When the Canadian city from which I moved a year ago sought to grow and gentrify, they “rebranded” themselves “the ambitious city,” promoting the idea that people who live there are real go-getters, high achievers, mini-Manhattanites.

Now that I actually live in Manhattan, this all seems a little ridiculous, but it’s interesting to me that they were drawing on a decades-old insult used against their city; not only were the people who lived there low class, but they were also distastefully “ambitious,” which was somehow worse. Strivers, in other words, a slur in the eyes of Brits and their imperial offspring.

Things have changed. At some point, no doubt, someone will publish “Leadership Lessons from Lady Macbeth.” Her issue with her husband, the great Scottish general who has been informed by a group of three witches that he is fated to be King of Scotland, is not that he lacks ambition, but that it’s not quite a mania with him. He has too much of the “milk of human kindness” and ambition must be single-minded and ruthless. Ambition here is a sort of lust, a blind drive. Macbeth sees ambition as a sort of wild beast, an untamed horse.

I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other.

And, of course, we still warn about “unbridled ambition.” Which isn’t to say we see a lack of ambition as a positive thing. You’ve likely heard more criticisms of people who “lack ambition” than those who are “too ambitious.” But ambition needs to be hitched to some higher cause; on its own, it aims solely at the aggrandizement of the individual, and can never really be satisfied in this aim. We have plenty of examples of ambitious individuals who are forever miserable.

And so, Macbeth is a play that stays relevant. We all remember the plot from high school: King Duncan’s troops have recently defeated the forces of Norway and Ireland, and his general Macbeth has distinguished himself in battle. Returning home, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo encounter three witches who tell him he will be Thane of Cawdor and thereafter King. When the first prophecy comes true, it seems clear what he has to do: kill the King and take his place.

Clear, at least, to Lady Macbeth, who goads him onwards. In realty, Macbeth is a failure as a heartless killer, unless it’s on the battlefield and in service of his King. Killing Duncan unhinges him, he seems in a daze, unsure if he’s even holding the knife. Once he kills the king and blame falls upon his two attendants (drunk and drugged) and two sons, who have fled in fear for their lives, Macbeth indeed becomes King. However, he has not the temperament for the role, slowly losing his mind, which his Lady tries to pass off as a lifelong weakness.

Naturally, more killings follow. It’s a bit like a noir film in which a horrible crime is committed and then several more are necessitated to cover up the first. In fact, a noir was filmed: 1955’s “Joe MacBeth,” although I’ve never seen it. In school, for some ungodly reason, we were shown “Roman Polanski’s Film of Macbeth,” the first film he made after his wife Sharon Tate was killed by the Manson family. It’s an eerie film and a violent one; everything seems damp and dirty and soaked in blood. It’s also a greatly made film, partly because it seems so grotty. The squalor of the deed is brought into vivid relief against the muck.

Joel Coen took a completely different approach in his 2021 film “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” which is shot in black and white on stylized soundstages that reminded me of surrealist paintings or, in a strange way, the Japanese film “The Ballad of Narayama,” whose similar “outdoor” soundstages feel dreamlike and eerie. In Coen’s film, Denzel Washington underplays Macbeth in a way that suits the character perfectly; at heart, he’s a weak man, after all, and probably would not declaim the “Out out brief candle” monologue as if he was Mussolini or a traffic cop.

There’s also a sadness at the heart of Coen’s film that sometimes is missing from performances of this tragedy. The scene in which MacDuff hears that his wife and children have been slaughtered- “all my pretty ones?”- is genuinely wrenching. The unfairness of it comes through in “He has no children,” thus no one to kill in revenge. Macbeth only has his wife, and in this version, they’re too old for such unwieldy ambition.

And too weak. Something that escaped my notice in High School is that neither husband nor wife is really suited for this business. Both of them make lousy psychopaths because they both think too much. Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me” speech is her desperate plea to be made more heartless and “cruel” like a man, but by that criteria, her own husband isn’t much of a man. They’re trying to fake it, to will themselves into being killers. Their true aim is something unnatural. It’s not unsexing, so much as dehumanizing. The illness that attends ambition is how it cuts ties of natural affection with everyone around us. In this, it is the real “thief of joy.” It mortgages the present for a future that will never come.

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.

The real future comes too quickly. The husband and wife aspire to become monsters and, in the end, they are mortals. At the heart of every tragedy was a man who forgot he was a man, and would not be one for very much longer.

And so, brief candles, what are YOU watching, playing, reading, creating, or pondering before you this weekend?