From the moment that Macbeth commits the heinous act of murdering King Duncan for his own end, Shakespeare’s play is embedded with ideas of innocence and guilt. His characters delve into their passions and ambitions, ignoring all else that matters, until we see them be defined by either their culpability or guiltlessness. And Shakespeare so masterfully analyzes how each and every one of them succumbs and reacts to their role, that the reader can almost see themselves reflected in his story and understand where certain characters went wrong. However innocence and guilt is not so simple in Macbeth – Shakespeare makes sure of it. Instead he intentionally blurs the lines that separate them in order to demonstrate the ambiguity and sheer complexity of the human condition. And that, in itself, is what makes Shakespeare’s analysis and subsequent message to do with human nature all the more relevant and credible. Thus, Shakespeare successfully explores the challenges associated with guilt and demonstrates our inability to separate it from innocence in order to comment on our basic human condition. He understands that humans tend to naively assume their own guilt will subside over time and therefore shows how his characters are unable to cope with the hardships associated with guilt. Furthermore he looks into the actions of a guilty person to help us discover that a reproachable action leads to another, to further establish the self-destructive nature of guilt. Finally – and most importantly – his display of the ambiguity between innocence and guilt provides social commentary on our class systems and chastises how quick we are to judge. Macbeth is therefore not just a timeless story of Kings and noblemen, but a deep insight on some of the most secret parts of humans; our innocence and our guilt.
“O, full of scorpions is my mind” – Macbeth could not have better described just how bad one’s guilt can feel. And yet, it’s not until after the murder of Duncan that he or Lady Macbeth can truly see to what extent their guilt can damage them. Macbeth is able to acknowledge that “even-handed justice commends th’ingredience of our poison’d chalice to our own lips”, essentially that the evil they are about to commit will come back at them. But even so, he sees it as a judgement one only faces once dead, and that he would only risk to “jump the life to come” and miss out on a peaceful ‘life’ after death. Thus, Macbeth does not comprehend how badly his own actions will affect him and rather chooses to undermine it. And the reason for this is that he is blinded by his ambition and first for power, as is Lady Macbeth. But she also acts as a manipulative force that further encourages Macbeth to ignore his suspicions that he will feel guilty – “chastise with the valour of [her] tongue all that impedes [him] from the golden round”. Their lust for power makes them throw caution to the wind because they are too set on the idea of control and authority. And here begins Shakespeare’s commentary on human nature. He analyzes our naivety and our innate tendency to concentrate on only one thing, thus ignoring all else that should matter, be that our morals or our sense of nobility. So he establishes this idea that we, amongst other things, like to assume that we will be able to deal with the consequences of our actions, notably our guilt. But this does not suffice – Shakespeare attempts to teach us a lesson by showing us just how much that kind of guilt can affect us, just like if we had scorpions in our minds. We first get a glimpse of this guilt right after the regicide, as Macbeth cries “I could not say ‘Amen’”, meaning his actions felt so evil and therefore ungodly. Macbeth also uses the blood on his hands to symbolize the extent of his guilt, claiming he is so reproachable that his “hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”. This powerful imagery so soon after the death of Duncan makes it impossible for the reader to not understand that guilt should not be underestimated. However Lady Macbeth perhaps better portrays just how terrible culpability can be – she goes from ignoring all ideas of guilt, to sleepwalking and eventually suiciding because she could not live with herself. Unlike Macbeth, not once do we see her acknowledging the guilt she will feel (this could be because she feels as though she is not the one actually committing the act) which makes her descent into unforgiving guilt all the more powerful. The very fact that Lady Macbeth sleepwalks is already a clear message from Shakespeare, or at least it would have been in his time. It was shrouded in mystery and often associated with the devil – people believed those who sleepwalked had a guilty conscience and symbolized moral unrest, which is exactly Lady Macbeth’s case. While she sleepwalks, we begin to understand how she feels her guilt by returning to its clever comparison to blood – “yet here’s a spot.”. She pleads for the guilt to go – “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” – but realises just how much it has affected her – “who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” The fact that Lady Macbeth speaks in prose further corroborates the unnatural and evil nature of her actions. Only a few acts before, Lady Macbeth was certain that “a little water clears [them] of this deed”, but now she asks herself, “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”. How did the confident Lady Macbeth end up in this state in so short a time? The answer, as Shakespeare wants us to see, is her guilt. The guilt that she so carelessly disregarded was too much for her to bear and it lead to her suicide only moments later. As the story closes and we see both Macbeth and his wife dead and remembered only as the “dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”, Shakespeare could not have been more obvious in telling us that we should never take things too lightly and think better than we tend to before acting.
Shakespeare knows that he cannot stop there. That analyzing how we think of guilt before it happens is not enough, he must also help the audience understand how we act once it’s too late. Because as he sees it, guilt is by nature self-destructive, pulling people further and further into more and worse treachery. Regicide is arguably one of the highest sins, especially from someone as trusted as the noble Macbeth was. It’s a betrayal of his loyalty to his king, of his duty as one of his subjects, and for the Elizabethans, it would have been an act going against god. Not only because any murder is a sin, but more specifically because the monarch was believed to be appointed by god. And yet, upon closer analysis, it appears that Macbeth’s assasination of King Duncan is not the worst thing he has done, particularly from a moral point of view. And that’s because, according to Shakespeare, a guilty person can be very easily pulled into further guilt. So by the end of the story, Macbeth has killed not only the king, but Macduff’s innocent family and worst of all, his own best friend. That is even more of a betrayal than the original murder. To kill Banquo, with whom he had fought bravely and shared so much, meant that Macbeth had sunk to an even lower point on his moral compass. Even so, it seems difficult to believe that Macbeth could simply forget all that connected him to his friend and order his assasination, but Shakespeare’s arguments for him doing so is all the more interesting. “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” – Macbeth is referring to his newfound power, and that it means nothing to have it if he does not feel secure in it. He knows that Banquo suspects him of Duncan’s murder as he was there to witness the prophecies of the witches. And so Macbeth cannot feel safe, his power is at stake. But it is not actually the power in itself, rather it is the guilt of how he came to this power. If Macbeth had become King by noble means he would automatically feel secure in his position, because ‘secure’ in this context is synonymous to being perceived as innocent. And so what Shakespeare is really trying to show is that a guilty person cannot feel confident and ‘secure’, but will often and wrongly assume that by committing more guilty acts this will be reversed. He scorns the human nature that pulls us into this endless loop of guilt, and thus encourages us to try and break apart, to stop as soon as we can, if not before. He pleads for us to not continue as Macbeth did, who went on to murder Macduff’s innocent wife, child and the whole of his house who had the least reason of all to be killed. One could think that Banquo’s murder was the worst thing Macbeth could do, but this senseless and meaningless action is perhaps worse still, and it perfectly concludes Shakespeare’s argument for how guilt is self-destructive. When the audience sees how far his guilt takes him they are encouraged to not follow in his steps and to just think a little more about what it means to be guilty. And Shakespeare’s comparison of it to power is possibly the best way to see it – as something that corrupts and leaves us wanting more, despite it never being able to give us the sense of ‘security’ we are all looking for.