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Lectures on Shakespeare

Macbeth is the best known of Shakespeare's plays. It is difficult to say anything particularly new or revealing about it. I can only raise some fairly obvious points in talking about three themes: murder, the nature of time and fate, and the three communities in the play - the community of light, the community of darkness and malice, and the world of the human being, which is in the middle earth and is pulled simultaneously towards both of the others.

I don't know how may of you are, like myself, detective story addicts. Why must you have a murder rather than a lesser crime in a detective story? Because unless it's a murder, you don't want to find out who did it. In Macbeth there are various kinds of death and bloodshed. In the beginning of the play there is a description of how Macbeth killed Macdonwald and we learn of the execution of the treacherous Thane of Cawdor. Neither is a murder. A war killing is not murder in that the killer and the killed are not in a personal relationship: each see in the other a representative of the enemy force. And an executioner sees not a person but an example of a certain crime, while the executed one sees the executioner as a representative of justice. Murder is defined by the intent to kill in a situation in which the relation between the killer and the killed is personal.

There are three classes of crime: (A) offenses against God and one's neighbor or neighbors, (B) offenses against God and society, and (C) offenses against God. All crimes, of course, are offenses against oneself not only direct ones like suicide or drink or drugs. Murder is a member and the only member of class B, offenses against God and society. The characteristic common to all crimes in Class A, offenses against God and one's neighbor, is that it is possible, at least theoretically, either that restitution can be made to the injured party - for example, stolen goods can be returned - or that the injured party can forgive the criminal - for example, in the case of rape. Consequently society as a whole is only indirectly involved. Its representatives - the police, etc. - act in the interest of the injured party. Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures. No one is there to accept the restitution or to grant forgiveness, and the murderer ceases to be related to the injured party. Murderers are often said to see ghosts, because a ghost is an expression of the murderer's desire not to be left alone with the consciousness of his crime, of his need to keep up the relationship with the person he has killed., we want to discover the murderer in a detective story because in other offenses the law acts on behalf of the injured person, but in murder, law and society must be substitutes for the injured party and must act on his behalf.

As to the murderer's end, of the three alternatives -execution, suicide, and madness - the first is preferable. If the murdered commits suicide, he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad, he cannot repent, but if he does not repent, society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society. In real life I disapprove of capital punishment, but in a detective story we demand capital punishment as the only proper end, the object of capital punishment is justice, the fulfillment of the assumptions that blood will have blood, that there be a life for a life. The murderer must desire to confess and must die willingly, and society must forgive him - the executioner asks forgiveness of the man he hangs. If you want life imprisonment, you are saying that the murderer refuses to acknowledge or realize his guilt and that all that can be done is to exclude him from society. There can be no question of expiation -death alone is an expiation. If the murderer admits guilt, either you must execute him or take it upon yourself to know the will of the victim and let him go.

I read about Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare in the New York Times book section. This book is divided into chapters, each of which is on a different Shakespeare play. The part that interested me most wasn't as much Auden's description of what each of the plays was on, as much as his views on the themes explored in the plays, which is why I chose this particular excerpt.