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Popular Culture Review
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desire;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (1.4.48-53)
Macbeth’s greatest characteristic is displayed here for the first time as well. As
he proclaims, “Stars, hide your fires! / Let not light see my black and deep
desire;” he shows an awareness that what he does is wrong; Macbeth,
throughout the play, is aware of the wrongness of his actions, but proceeds forth
with them anyway. The question that must be answered—the question that will
be answered upon further inspection of Duncan’s character—is why.
Duncan’s kingdom is far from harmonious. Harry Berger, Jr. points out that,
“By the middle of 1.4 the Scottish King has run into two rebels, a foreign foe,
and a budding regicide. These facts have to be set against the persistent praise of
Duncan as an ideal king, the head of a harmonious state ‘whose members are
bound into unity by the accepted ties of loyalty’” (4). It is Duncan’s gentleness,
his softness that weakens him as a king and makes him susceptible to attack
(Berger, 18). This gentleness is apparent in Duncan’s speech to Macbeth:
O Worthiest cousin!
The sin of my ingratitude even now
Was heavy on me. Thou art so far before,
That swiftest wing of recompense is slow
To overtake thee: would thou hadst less deserv’d,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine! only I have left to say,
More is thy due than more than all can pay. (14-21)
Duncan as a gentle king is a necessary depiction. Shakespeare had to be careful
with his portrayal of regicide. To produce a play about the downfall of a tyrant
king on the heels of the Gunpowder Plot would have resulted in the censorship
of Macbeth and Shakespeare’s death—a gentle king is as dangerous to the
people as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and Shakespeare had to hide his critique of
James. Wills captures this danger when he reminds us that, “The plays produced
in this time also echo the Plot, though censors laid a more restraining hand on
drama than on other forms of literature because of the historic distrust o f theatre
troupes and their playbooks" (18, emphasis mine). To make the regicide
obviously justifiable in any way would have been folly.
By creating in Duncan a “gentle king” Shakespeare created a kingdom
constantly in as much danger from within as from without. Macdonwald and
Cawdor turn traitor at the beginning of the play; Norway attacks Macbeth and
Banquo, and Duncan, in elevating Macbeth to Thane of Cawdor, creates his own
doom. The play’s opening with the treason of Cawdor and Macdonwald and
ending with Macbeth shows that while traitors may be killed, “treason itself
escapes containment” (Coddon, 485).