In his classic book The Elizabethean World Picture, Eustace Tillyard focuses on the concept of "the great chain of being" as one that held the universe together in an ordered hierarchy, with God at top and the lowest aspects of nature at the bottom. Mankind, especially in the Renaissance incarnation of this worldview, was in the center, though less important than heavenly creatures like angels and less important than God. (It was common in the Renaissance to call humans the "great amphibians," halfway between angels and animals.) In this view of the universe, all of nature from the celestial spheres to the grass growing beneath our feet will function properly if everyone and everything keeps to their place in the hierarchy, and does their job properly. Everything has a place and its place is carefully delineated, down to oaks being higher than other kinds of trees. This worldview places great emphasis on order and harmony, and on maintaining right relationship between beings on the chain. It permeated Renaissance thought, especially as texts by Aristotle, who is credited with articulating its first incarnation, became more widely available.
Macbeth illustrates the disaster that follows when individuals attempt to break out of the great chain of being in pursuit of their own ambitions. In the chain of being, the anointed king is appointed by God and must not be challenged by subordinates, especially if he is not violating his contract with his people, as Duncan was not. Macbeth breaks this code and causes bloodshed and near chaos.
Shakespeare underlines this disruption in the order of being (this play is not just about one individual wanting power but also about the proper ordering of the universe) by relating Macbeth's perversion of order to the "unnatural:" the witches who advise him are described and appear as unnatural, androgynous creatures, ugly and out of sync with God's natural order. The play opens with a sense of nature out of joint--"fair is foul and foul is fair," as the witches put in in a scene that offers images of thunder, lightning, "fog and filthy" air. Macbeth describes his guilt in terms of nature polluted and changed: the green seas, for example, he imagines turning red from his blood. At the same time some of the play's irony rests on the way Macbeth takes comfort in the laws of nature that he has disrupted through murdering the king--laws that say, for example, a forest can't move, though, symbolically, as we see, once Macbeth starts violating the chain of being, nature itself can go awry. (The Birnam Woods, of course, don't move, but the men cut down branches to disguise themselves so that it looks like the forest is moving, a metaphor for the disruptions and chaos Macbeth has caused.)
Finally, through Malcolm, Shakespeare relates contemporary Renaissance wisdom about what constitutes a good king: virtues of purity, loyalty, honesty, lack of greed. Shakespeare obliquely enters a debate on kingship going on at the time: his ideal king is not Machiavellian (in the Renaissance Machiavelli openly introduced and justified the idea of realpolitik in princely behavior). Also, in Malcolm's sense of his character imposing restraint and limits on his kingly rights, there perhaps is a quiet criticism of the way some rulers took the "divine right of kings" doctrine out too far.
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