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Violence is the heart and soul of Macbeth. It permeates the action and the narrative; it clings to the characters; it infects and controls the imagination of each of the personae. There is no respite, no real relief from violence in any tiny nook or large landscape of the drama. In many ways this is Shakespeare's most hopeless play; no moment is free of danger and dread, while catastrophe seems constantly imminent. Good news itself is tempered with anxiety. When the witches bring the tidings of Macbeth's elevation to Thane of Cawdor, his body seems to act independently of his will. Macbeth informs his wife of the good things that have happened to him, and she sees only a bloody staircase to the future. The sadness of the play is housed in Macbeth's terrible, passionate regret, itself the product of a violence that looms and lingers in the play; it never goes away or gets less.
It is not idle to ask where the tragedy of the death of this murderer and tyrant lies. Why and how do the panic and horror of the murderer-usurper affect us and appeal to our hearts? His death is presented and proclaimed as a release from tyranny and violence: we should rejoice in it. And yet even here, even with the death of the tyrant, a kind of tragic horror hovers like smoke over the ending of the play. Something infinitely precious has been lost in the rubble that violence has left behind. The presence of Macbeth's severed head at the end mocks the aura of triumph with which the play concludes. Its message is mixed and contradictory: the tyrant is dead but violence thrives. The celebratory lines at the play's conclusion are thick with the satisfactions that violence has brought and can bring. Seyward thrills at the news of his own son's violent death and declares:
Had I as many sons as I have hairs
I would not wish them to a fairer death.
(5.9. 14-5)1
The very manhood that Macbeth himself has extolled remains a potent reality as the play ends. There are no women in the final scenes. The drama has arrived at a world without them, a world entirely under the control of men of...