Chapter 6

“Yet I do fear thy nature;It is too full o' the milk of human kindness,To catch the nearest way; Thou would'st be great;Art not without ambition; but withoutThe illness should attend it. What thou would'st highlyThat would'st thou holily, would'st not play false,And yet would'st wrongly win: thou'd'st have, great Glamis,That which cries,Thus thou must do, if thou have it;And that which rather thou dost fear to do,Than wishest should be undone.”

“Yet I do fear thy nature;It is too full o' the milk of human kindness,To catch the nearest way; Thou would'st be great;Art not without ambition; but withoutThe illness should attend it. What thou would'st highlyThat would'st thou holily, would'st not play false,And yet would'st wrongly win: thou'd'st have, great Glamis,That which cries,Thus thou must do, if thou have it;And that which rather thou dost fear to do,Than wishest should be undone.”

Yet Macbeth at bottom dared not murder the king, he only toyed with the thought. He must be instigated from without, if the deed is not to be put off until the Greek calends. Lady Macbeth from the very beginning feels it her task to strengthen her laggard and doubting husband in his ambition. This Shakespeare had already found in Holinshed. As the chronicle has pictured it: “Still more did his wife urge him on to attack the king, for she was exorbitantly ambitious and burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen.”[34]While she thus incited her husband, she fulfilled yet more the longing of her own heart:

“Hie thee hither,That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;And chastise with the valour of my tongueAll that impedes thee from the golden round.”

“Hie thee hither,That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;And chastise with the valour of my tongueAll that impedes thee from the golden round.”

She summons herself also to the task, calls the evil spirits of the air to her aid and will become a man, since her husband is no man:

“Come, come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-fullOf direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,Stop up the access and passage to remorse;That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers!”

“Come, come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-fullOf direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,Stop up the access and passage to remorse;That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers!”

When Macbeth announces, “Duncan comes here to-night,” she asks sinisterly, “And when goes hence?”—Macbeth: “To-morrow—as he purposes.”—Lady Macbeth:

“O, neverShall sun that morrow see!. . . . . . .. . . . .He that's comingMust be provided for; and you shall putThis night's great business into my despatch;Which shall to all our nights and days to comeGive solely sovereign sway and masterdom.”

“O, neverShall sun that morrow see!. . . . . . .. . . . .He that's comingMust be provided for; and you shall putThis night's great business into my despatch;Which shall to all our nights and days to comeGive solely sovereign sway and masterdom.”

It may be seen that the really cruel one is here first Lady Macbeth and not her husband. He on the contrary must always torture himself with scruples and doubts. He constantly holds before himself the outward results of his deed, brings everything together which should protect Duncan from his dagger and can only say in regard to the opposite course:

“I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself,And falls on the other.”

“I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself,And falls on the other.”

And he explains to his wife, “We will proceed no further in this business.” Then must Lady Macbeth rebuke him as a coward, no longer trust his love, if he, when time and place so wait upon him, retract from his purpose. She lays on the strongest accent, yes, uses the “word of fury”:

“I have given suck; and knowHow tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;I would, while it was smiling in my face,Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn, as youHave done to this.”—

“I have given suck; and knowHow tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;I would, while it was smiling in my face,Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn, as youHave done to this.”—

and finally develops the entire plan and promises her assistance, before she can persuade her husband to the murder.

She has stupefied the two chamberlains, upon whom the guilt shall be rolled, with spiced wine and drunk herself full of courage for the deed, as so many criminals.

“That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold;What hath quenched them, hath given me fire.”

“That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold;What hath quenched them, hath given me fire.”

Then she hears Macbeth within at his gruesome work uttering a terrified question, and continues:

“Alack! I am afraid they have awaked,And 'tis not done:—the attempt, and not the deed,Confounds us;—Hark!—I laid their daggers ready,He could not miss them.—Had he not resembledMy father as he slept, I had done't.”

“Alack! I am afraid they have awaked,And 'tis not done:—the attempt, and not the deed,Confounds us;—Hark!—I laid their daggers ready,He could not miss them.—Had he not resembledMy father as he slept, I had done't.”

Then her husband appears with the daggers. As he looks at his bloody hands a cry is wrung from him, “This is a sorry sight.” Yet the Lady repulses him harshly, “A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.”

Macbeth:

“Methought, I heard a voice cry,Sleep no more!Macbeth doth murder sleep. . . .. . . . . . . . . . .And therefore … Macbeth shall sleep no more!”

“Methought, I heard a voice cry,Sleep no more!Macbeth doth murder sleep. . . .. . . . . . . . . . .And therefore … Macbeth shall sleep no more!”

Lady Macbeth quiets him but he weakens his high courage by brooding over the deed.

“Go, get some water,And wash this filthy witness from your hand.—Why did you bring these daggers from the place?They must lie there. Go, carry them; and smearThe sleepy grooms with blood.”

“Go, get some water,And wash this filthy witness from your hand.—Why did you bring these daggers from the place?They must lie there. Go, carry them; and smearThe sleepy grooms with blood.”

Then however as her husband refuses to look again upon his deed Lady Macbeth herself seizes the daggers:

“The sleeping and the deadAre but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood,That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal.”

“The sleeping and the deadAre but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood,That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal.”

Macbeth (alone):

“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this bloodClean from my hand? No; this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seasincarnadine,Making the green one red.”

“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this bloodClean from my hand? No; this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seasincarnadine,Making the green one red.”

Lady Macbeth (returning):

“My hands are of your colour; but I shameTo wear a heart so white. . . . .. . . . . . .retire we to our chamber:A little water clears us of this deed;How easy is it then! Your constancyHath left you unattended.”

“My hands are of your colour; but I shameTo wear a heart so white. . . . .. . . . . . .retire we to our chamber:A little water clears us of this deed;How easy is it then! Your constancyHath left you unattended.”

But the horrid deed has not brought the expected good fortune. After Duncan's murder Macbeth finds no rest and no sleep: “To be thus, is nothing; But to be safely thus.” So he first considers removing Banquo and his son. But Lady Macbeth is little content:

“Nought's had, all's spent,Where our desire is got without content;'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”

“Nought's had, all's spent,Where our desire is got without content;'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”

Then comes her husband. All night he has been so shaken with terrible dreams that he would rather be in Duncan's place, “Thanon the torture of the mind to lie, In restless ecstasy.” Lady Macbeth tries here to comfort him with the only tender impulse in the drama:

“Come on;Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night.”[35]

“Come on;Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night.”[35]

Macbeth promises to do as she asks and charges her to treat Banquo especially with distinction. Nor does he conceal from her what now tortures him most, “Dear wife, Thou knowest that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.” And immediately the Lady is her old self: “But in them nature's copy's not eterne.” Though Lady Macbeth is represented as at once prepared for a second murder, Macbeth has now no more need of her: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed.”

Yet, although he shrinks back no longer from any sort of evil deed, he does so before the horrible pictures of his phantasies, the hallucinations of his unconscious. Here is where Shakespeare's genius enters. The Macbeth of the Chronicle commits throughout all his acts of horror apparently in cold blood. At least nothing to the contrary is reported. With Shakespeare on the other hand Macbeth, who is represented in the beginning as more ambitious than cruel, is pathologically tainted. From his youth on he suffered from frequent visions, which, for example, caused him to see before Duncan's murder an imaginary dagger. This “strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me,” comes to light most vividly on the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the banquet. Lady Macbeth must use all her presence of mind to save at least the outward appearance. With friendly exhortation, yet with grim reproof and scornful word, she attempts to bring her husband to himself. In this last scene, when she interposes in Macbeth's behavior, she stands completely at the height. Not until the guestshave departed does she grow slack in her replies. In truth neither her husband's resolution to wade on in blood nor his word that strange things haunt his brain can draw from her more than the response, “You lack the season of all natures, sleep.” It seems as if she had collapsed exhausted after her tremendous psychical effort.

Shakespeare has in strange fashion told us nothing of what goes on further in her soul, though he overmotivates everything else, even devotes whole scenes to this one purpose. We first see her again in the last act in the famous sleep walking scene. She begins to walk in her sleep, falls ill with it one might well say, just on that day when Macbeth goes to war. Her lady in waiting saw her from this day on, at night, “rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”—“A great perturbation in nature! to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching,” the evidently keen sighted physician thinks. He soon has the opportunity to observe the Lady's sleep walking for himself. She comes, in her hand a lighted candle, which at her express command must be always burning near her bed. Her eyes are open as she walks, but their sense is shut. Then she rubs her hands together as if to wash them, which she does according to the statement of the lady in waiting, often continuously for a quarter of an hour.

Now they hear her speaking: “Yet here's a spot. Out damned spot! out, I say!—One, two, why, then 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord! a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?—The Thane of Fife had a wife; Where is she now?—What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that; you mar all with this starting.—Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! oh! oh!—Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale;—I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he cannot come out of his grave.—To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.” After such appearances she always in fact goes promptly to bed. The physician who observes her pronounces his opinion: “This disease is beyond my practice. Yet have I known those which have walked in their sleep, whohave died holily in their beds.” Here however there seems to be something different:

“Foul whisperings are abroad; unnatural deedsDo breed unnatural troubles.”

“Foul whisperings are abroad; unnatural deedsDo breed unnatural troubles.”

And then as if he were a psychoanalyst:

“Infected mindsTo their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.More needs she the divine, than the physician.—God, God forgive us all! Look after her;Remove from her the means of all annoyance,And still keep eyes upon her.”

“Infected mindsTo their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.More needs she the divine, than the physician.—God, God forgive us all! Look after her;Remove from her the means of all annoyance,And still keep eyes upon her.”

Also he answers Macbeth, who inquires after the condition of the patient.

“Not so sick, my lord,As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,That keep her from her rest.…. . . . . .Therein the patientMust minister to himself.”

“Not so sick, my lord,As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,That keep her from her rest.…. . . . . .Therein the patientMust minister to himself.”

Yet as the king's star declines neither the doctor's foresight nor his skill prevents Lady Macbeth, the “diabolical queen” from laying hands upon herself.

This case of sleep walking, if we consider it, seems first to correspond entirely to the popular view, that the wanderer carries over to the nighttime the activities of the day, or to speak more correctly, of the most important day of the last month. We saw in the first act how she reproaches Macbeth for his cowardice, encourages him and controls his actions. Only in two points, very significant ones to be sure, does it appear that she has now taken over her husband's rôle upon herself; in the disturbance of her sleep and the concern for the blood upon her hands. How had she rebuffed Macbeth when he had called out in regard to his bloody hands, “This is a sorrysight!”It was only a foolish thought. “Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand.” But Macbeth was not to be shaken, the entire ocean would not suffice. Rather would the king's blood, which he had shed, change its green to glowing red. Yet when Lady Macbeth completes his work for him, she remarks lightly, “My hands are of your color; but I shame To wear a heart so white.… A little water clears us of this deed.” In her sleep walking itself she encourages her husband, “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown.” She seeks however in vainin this very sleep walking to wipe the stains from her hands, they smell always of blood and not all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten her hands. Must not the inner meaning of all her sleep walking lie exactly in these two points, in which she has so completely turned about?

It must be observed that in the tragedy as in the previously related tale of the “Sin Child” the sleep walking does not begin in childhood nor in puberty, but in both instances in somewhat more mature years, and, what is significant, as an illness, more precisely a psychic illness. The sin child fell ill because he had lost his pure beloved one, who had taken the place of his mother, the original love object of his earliest childhood; and Lady Macbeth, who had herself become queen through a murder, falls ill just at that moment when her lord must go to the battlefield to defend his life and his crown. For not without reason the fate of Macduff's wife, who was slain when her husband had gone from her, occurs to her also when she, while wandering, speaks of the much blood which Duncan had. Therefore it seems likely, and is in fact generally believed, that Lady Macbeth becomes ill because of her anxiety for life and kingdom. Only the facts do not strictly agree with this. In the first place her husband's campaign is by no means unpromising. On the contrary he has heard from the witches that his end would be bound with apparently unfulfillable conditions, so unfulfillable that the prophecy at once frees him from all fear.

Having hidden nothing from the “partner of his greatness” he would scarcely conceal the promise of the witches, which increased his confidence to the uttermost. Besides it cannot be fear and anxiety which brings on her night wandering. Another current explanation also seems to me to have little ground. As Brandes has recently interpreted it, “The sleep walking scene shows in the most remarkable fashion how the pricking of an evil conscience, when it is dulled by day, is more keen at night and robs the guilty one of sleep and health.” Now severe pangs of conscience may well disturb sleep, but they would hardly create sleep walking. Criminals are hardly noctambulists. Macbeth himself is an example how far stings of conscience and remorse can lead a sensitive man. He has no more rest after he has murdered the king and Banquo, yet he does not become a sleep walker. There must be another cause here which precipitates Lady Macbeth's sleep walking.

We will first examine the relation of husband and wife to one another in order to trace out this mystery. The character of LadyMacbeth has caused many a one in Germany to rack his brains since the time of Tieck. Up till that time she passed simply as Megaera, as an “arch witch,” as Goethe calls her. This opinion prevailed not only in Germany but in the English motherland too. But this view went against the grain with the German spirit. Therefore Ludwig Tieck first looked upon Lady Macbeth as a tender, loving wife. From this time on there arose critics and even poets, who in the same way wished to wash her clean. I will cite the two most important, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Rudolf Hans Bartsch. The former, of whom I explained earlier, that he did not hesitate to make an interpolation to prove his point, sums up his judgment in the following sentences: “It is not ambition alone that moves her, but love which would see her lord become great” (p. 78). And in a second place, “She loved her husband and had sacrificed her conscience more for him than for herself” (p. 124). R. H. Bartsch goes much further in his romance, “Elisabeth Kött.” Wigram says to the heroine, “Do you not feel how she (Lady Macbeth) before everything that she says cannot hitch horses enough to carry her slow and immovable lord along?” In the sleep walking scene “the utter crushing of this poor, overburdened heart burst forth in the torture of the dream wandering.” At the close he pronounces his opinion: “If there is a poor weak woman upon earth, so it is this arch enchantress, who loves her husband so much that she has in admirable fashion studied all his faults and weaknesses that she may cover over the deficiencies with her trembling body. Seek the wife in her rôle!”

What truth is there in these viewpoints? The poet himself has been dead for three hundred years and has left behind him not a syllable concerning Lady Macbeth except in the text of the tragedy. Therefore according to my opinion nothing remains but to keep to this. At the most we can draw upon Holinshed's chronicle, which Shakespeare so frequently followed literally. According to this Lady Macbeth was extravagantly ambitious and when she continually urged Macbeth to murder Duncan, this was only because she “burned with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen.” There is never a syllable of a feeling of love for her husband, or that she desired the crown only for his sake. This objection might be made here, that as Shakespeare has often gone beyond his source, as in creating the sleep walking scene without a model for it, so he might just as well have given characters to Lady Macbeth of which the source said nothing. Certainly that would be apriori conceivable. Only that must appear clearly from the text of the tragedy. Yet what does this say? Carefully as I have read its lines, I have not been able to find a single, actual uninterpolated word of love from Lady Macbeth. That is of double significance from the poet of “Romeo and Juliet.” He who could give such language to love would not have completely denied it in “Macbeth,” if Lady Macbeth was to have been a loving wife. One can find everything in her words, warning, entreaty and adjuration, upbraidings and threatenings, anger, yes, almost abuse, yet not one natural note of love.

This has a so much harsher effect since her husband approaches her usually as an actual lover, or more accurately stated up to the murder of Banquo. She is warm only where it concerns the attainment of her goal; it is her ambition which demands satisfaction. She is always to her husband “my dearest partner of my greatness” as he once appropriately writes her. It is not to be considered that Shakespeare, who always overmotivates his situations, should have at the height of his power so obscured from recognition all the love impulses, which would have seemed to be decisive for her whole character. The truth is simply that Lady Macbeth is no loving wife, but merely greedy of fame, as already represented in the Chronicle. I suspect that the authors who all the way through see in her the loving spouse are expressing their own complexes, their own unconscious wishes. Such an one as Bartsch for example cannot think otherwise of a woman than as unfolding lovingly to the man.

Lady Macbeth makes upon me, in her relation toward her frequently wooing husband as it were, the impression of anatura frigida, that is a sexually cold woman. If one takes her own frightful word for it, that she could tear the breast from her own sucking child and dash its brains out, then the mother love seems never to have been strong within her, but rather whatever feeling she has possessed has been changed to passionate ambition. Now psychoanalytic experience teaches that when a woman remains sexually cold toward a sympathetic and potent man, this goes back to an early sealing up of affect with a forbidden, because an incest object. Such women have almost always from their tenderest infancy on loved father or brother above all and never through all their lives freed themselves from this early loved object. Though at puberty compelled to cut them off as sexual objects, yet they have held fast to them in the unconscious and become incapable of transferring to another man. It is possible also in the case of Lady Macbeth tothink of such an indissoluble bond. Moreover certain features in the sleep walking scene seem to speak directly of a repressed sexual life.

Lady Macbeth wanders at night, since her husband has left her and marital intercourse has been broken off.[36]In her hand is a lighted candle, which according to her express command must burn near her bed, and only now for the first time, otherwise the lady in waiting would not have laid such stress upon the fact. The candle in her hand, that is a feature which up till now we have met in none of our cases, but which, as a glance into literature teaches me, is by no means infrequently found with sleep walkers. It can hardly be considered a mere accident that Shakespeare discovered just this characteristic, which is really atypical. One would be much more inclined to suspect in it a secret, hidden meaning. Then at once a connection forces itself. We know from the infantile history of so many people that a tenderly solicitous parent, the father or the mother, likes to convince himself or herself, with a candle in the hand, that the child is asleep.[37]Then we would have on one side a motive for sleep walking in general, that one is playing the part of the loving parent, as on the other hand a motive for the lighted candle. The latter has however a symbolic sexual sense which is quite typical and is repeatedly and regularly found. The burning candle always stands for one thing and signifies in dreams as in fairy tales, folklore, and sagas without exception the same thing, an erect phallus. Now it becomes clear why Lady Macbeth, after her husband had gone to the war, has a lighted candle always burning near her bed, and why then she wanders around like a ghost with it at night.

The conclusion of the words she utters during her sleep walking contains a second unmistakably sexual relationship. Here she repeats not less than five times the demand upon her husband, “To bed,” while in the corresponding murder scene (II, 2) it simply reads, “Retire we to our chamber; A little water clears us of this deed.” The further repetition, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand,” sounds again infantile through and through. So one speaks to a child, scarcely to an adult. It seems as if she takes the father or the mother by the hand and bids them go to bed. One recognizes already in this passage that this atypical sleep walking of Lady Macbeth also leads naturally into the sexual and the infantile.

It will not be difficult to determine now toward whom the repressed, because strongly forbidden, sexual wishes of Lady Macbeth are directed. Who else could it be but her own father, the original love object of every little girl; what other person of her childhood, who later becomes an unsuitable sexual object, but yet hinders for all the future the transference of love over to the husband? This is the one who summons her to walk in her sleep, the lighted candle in her hand. It is quite an everyday experience, which holds for everyone, for the well as for every one who later becomes ill, that in reality the first love, which bears quite clearly features of sense pleasure, belongs to the earliest years of childhood, and that its objects are none other than the child's own parents and in the second place the brothers and sisters. Here the polar attraction of the sexes holds in the relation of the elder to the younger and vice versa, that is the attraction of the man to the woman and the woman to the man. It is “a natural tendency,” says Freud[38]in the “Interpretation of Dreams,” “for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who discourages it.… Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and at the same time reinforces the feeling which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that corresponds to theirs.”

We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, the being in love with the parent of the opposite sex, and then the resistance against the one of the same sex. Corresponding to the love, every child in the period of innocence wants to “marry” the former. I recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between him and his little five year old daughter. She began, “I want to get married.”—“To whom?”—“To you, Papa.”—“I already have a wife.”—“Then you would have two wives.”—“That won't do.”—“Very well, then I will choose a man who is as nice as you.” And Freud relates (p. 219), “An eight year old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. ‘Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,’ and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl,not yet four years old, … says outright: ‘Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.’”

We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader point of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths teaches us regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of all peoples in their period, identify father with king or emperor. Naturally then the father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of experience, which is always to be substantiated, can be applied to Lady Macbeth and makes her ambition at once transparent to us. I affirmed above that her lack of sexual feeling toward her husband had its origin in the fact that she had loved her father too much and could not therefore free herself from him. Her sexuality had transformed itself into ambition and that, the ambition to be queen,[39]in other words, the father's wife. So could she hold fast to the infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest. The intensity with which she pursues the ambition of her life is explained then by the glowing intensity of her sexual wishes.

With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A remark of Lady Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to the murder of Duncan. “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't.” This physical likeness signifies identity of individuals, as we know from many analogous examples. The king therefore resembles the father because he stands for her parent. Still one more point may be well explained from her father complex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening ambition of Lady Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning ambition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile bed wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed upon the chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we comprehend from another side, with the so frequent identification with beloved persons, precisely why the lady wanders at night with a candle in her hand. Here again appears plainly the return to the infantile erotic.

Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes willnever be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. Then her power of endurance gives way until her very soul fails utterly. As she says on the occasion of the first disappointment after Duncan's death:

“Nought's had, all's spent,Where our desire is got without content;'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”

“Nought's had, all's spent,Where our desire is got without content;'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”

Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the rôle of father, who once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, “Come, come, come, come, give me yourhand!”and bade her go to bed.

Why however does not the ruthless Macbeth live down the murder of the king as he does in the history? I believe that we must here go still further back than to the Chronicle, even to the creator of the tragedy himself. There is a certain important crisis in Shakespeare's life, where according to the biography by George Brandes “cheerfulness, the very joy of life, was extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds gathered over his horizon, we now do not know just what their source. Gnawing griefs and disappointments gathered within him. We see his melancholy grow and extend itself; we can observe the changing effects of this melancholy without clearly recognizing its cause. Only we feel this, that the scene of action which he sees with the inner eye of the soul has now become as black as the external scene of which he makes use. A veil of phantasy has sunk down over both. He writes no more comedies but puts a succession of dark tragedies upon the stage, which lately reëchoed to the laughter of his Rosalinds and Beatrices.”

This crisis came in the year 1601, when the earl of Essex and Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's special patron, were condemned to death because of treason against the life of the king. According to Brandes the depression over their fate must have been one of the original causes for the poet's beginning melancholy. Perhaps the death of Shakespeare's father, which followed some months later, made a more lasting impression with all the memories which it recalled. The dramas which the poet published about that time, Julius Cæsar, Hamlet and Macbeth, have a common theme, they all revolveabout a father murder. In “Julius Cæsar,” Brutus murders his fatherly friend, his mother's beloved (“And thou too, my son Brutus?”). Hamlet comes to shipwreck in his undertaking to avenge upon his uncle the father's murder, because the uncle, as Freud explains in his “Interpretation of Dreams,” had at bottom done nothing else than Hamlet had wished in his childhood but had not had the self confidence to carry out. And Macbeth in the last analysis is ruined by the king and father murder, the results of which he can never overcome. We may consider this theme of the father murder, always presented in some new form, in the light of its direct precipitating causes, the actual death of Shakespeare's father and Southampton's treason against the ruling power of the state. It is not difficult to accept that at that time the infantile death wishes against his father were newly awakened in our poet himself and were then projected externally in a series of powerful dramas.

Perhaps the reader, who has followed me more or less up to this point, will stop here indignant: “How could any one maintain that a genius like Shakespeare could have wished to murder his father, even if only in the phantasies ofchildhood?”I can only reply to this apparently justified indignation that the assumption I here make concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human and is true with every male child. We go for proof to what we have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite sex, the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same sex, who may be only justly concerned in his education without over indulging him. The child would be most delighted to “marry” the tender parent, as we heard above, and therefore feels that the other parent stands in the way as a disturbing rival. “If the little boy,” says Freud in the “Interpretation of Dreams,”[40]“is allowed to sleep at his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his father's return he must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father's death is obviously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child's experience has taught him that ‘dead’ folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return.”

Yet how does the child reach such a depth of depravity as to wish his parents dead? We may answer “that the childish idea of ‘being dead’ has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing.… Fear of death is strange to the child, therefore it plays with the horrible word.… Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as ‘being gone,’ not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by traveling, estrangement or death.… If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die.”[41]It may be conjectured, if we apply this to Shakespeare, that also this greatest of all dramatists repeatedly during his childhood wished his father dead and that this appeared in consciousness agitating him afresh at the actual decease of the father and impelled him to those dramas which had the father murder as their theme. Moreover the father's calling, for he was not only a tanner but also a butcher, who stuck animals with a knife, may have influenced the form of his death wishes as well as of their laterreappearancesin the great dramas.

The evil thoughts against the father in the child psyche by no means exclude the fact that at the same time there are present with them tender impulses, feelings of warmest love. This is indeed the rule according to all experience and can be proved also with Shakespeare. This other side of his childish impulse leads for example to the powerful ambition which we find as a chief characteristic of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as in truth of the poet himself. We know that when the latter was a boy his father became bankrupt. He had not only lost everything which he himself possessed, his wife's dowry and his position as alderman, but was also so deeply in debt at this time that he had to guard himself against arrest. Once more I let Brandes express it: “The object of Shakespeare's desire was not in the first place either the calling of a poet or fame as an actor, but wealth and that chiefly as a means for social advance. He took very much to heart his father's decline in material fortune and official respect. He held passionately from his youth up to the purpose to reëstablish the name and the position of his family.… His father had not dared to go along the streets, fearingto be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a member of the lesser nobility.… In the year 1596 his father, apparently at his instigation and with his support, entered a petition at Heralds College for the bestowal of a coat of arms. The granting of the coat of arms signified the ceremonial entry into the gentry.” The ambition of the small child is to become as great as the father, and so later that of the man is to exalt the father himself, to make him king. One sees how close and how very personal the theme of ambition was to Shakespeare.

Before I go on to analyze further what the poet has woven into his treatment of “Macbeth” from his own purely personal experience, we must first consider a technical factor which is common to all dramatists. It has been discovered that Shakespeare projected his own complexes into his tragedies, complexes which are in no way simple, but which show, for example, close to the hatred even as great a love as well as other contrary elements. He is fond of separating his dramatic projection into two personalities wherever his feeling is an ambivalent one, these two forms standing in contrast to one another. He splits his ego into two persons, each of which corresponds to only one single emotional impulse. That is a discovery which of course was not made for the first time by psychoanalysis. Minor, for instance, writes in his book on Schiller: “Only in conjunction with Carlos does Posa represent Schiller's whole nature, the wild passion of the one is the expression of the sensual side, the noble exaltation of the other the stoical side of his nature.… Schiller has not drawn this figure from external nature; it has not come to him from without but he has taken it deep from his inner being.” Otto Ludwig expresses himself similarly: “Goethe often separates a man into two poetic forms, Faust-Mephisto, Clavigo-Carlos.”

It is plainly to be seen, if we apply our recognition of this fact to Shakespeare, that he has projected his ego affect into Macbeth as well as his wife, which gives numerous advantages. So far we have considered Lady Macbeth merely as a complete dramatic character,which she is first of all. Besides this nevertheless she surely corresponds to a splitting of Shakespeare's affect, for the poet incorporates in her his instincts for ruthless ambition. He has worked over the character already given her by the Chronicle for his own exculpation. It was stated previously that Macbeth in the first two acts is by no means the bloodthirsty tyrant of Holinshed and really stands far behind his wife in ambition. It is as if our poet, who plainly stands behind his hero, wished thereby to say, I am not capable of a father murder and would surely have put it off or not have accomplished it at all, if I had not been compelled by a woman's influence. Macbeth will go no further in the affair in spite of all favorable outward circumstances, but it is Lady Macbeth who forces the deed to completion. The final cause of every father hatred is rivalry in regard to the mother and so it was she, represented by Lady Macbeth, who in his phantasy would have urged the infantile Shakespeare to put his father out of the way. Here branches out another path for the sleep walking. We have so far spoken only of the father who comes at night to the child, but now Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep, seems also to represent Shakespeare's mother, who with the candle in her hand convinces herself that her darling child is sleeping soundly.[42]

It need not seem strange that I give a number of interpretations apparently so fundamentally different for one and the samething.There is nothing on earth more complicated than psychic things, among which poetic creation belongs. Psychic phenomena are according to all experience never simply built up nor simply grounded but always brought together in manifold form. Whoever presses deeply into them discovers behind every psychic manifestation without exception an abundance of relationships and overdeterminations. We are accustomed in the natural sciences to simple motivation, on the one side cause, on the other effect. In the psychic life it is quite otherwise. Only a superficial psychology is satisfied with single causes. So manifold a chain of circumstances, those that lie near at hand and those more remotely connected, come into play inmost, yes, apparently in all cases, that one scarcely has the right to assert that a psychic phenomenon has been completely explained. Dream analysis at once proves this. One can almost always rightfully take it for granted that several, indeed manifold interpretations are correct. It is best to think of a stratified structure. In the most superficial layer lies the most obvious explanation, in the second a somewhat more hidden one, and in yet deeper strata broader and more remote relationships and all have their part more or less in the manifested phenomenon. This latter is more or less well motivated.

We now turn back to Shakespeare and observe the great depression under which he labored just at the time when he created his greatest tragedies. Does it seem too presumptuous to conceive that one so shaken and dejected psychically should have slept badly and even possibly—we know so little of his life—walked in his sleep? The poet always hastened to repress[43]whatever personal revelationsthreatened to press through too plainly, as we know from many proofs. The poverty of motivation quite unusual with Shakespeare, just at the critical point of the sleep walking, seems to me to score for such a repression. We might perhaps say that the fact that the poet has introduced to such slight extent the wandering of Lady Macbeth, has given it so little connection with what went before, is due simply to this, that all sorts of most personal relationships were too much involved to allow him to be more explicit. See how Lady Macbeth comforted Macbeth directly after the frightful deed, the king and father murder:

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