ƒIt is only fair to say in defense, or at least explanation, of Polanski’s cinematic choices, that others have found Ross an ambiguous, politically and morally ambivalent character. He is, for instance, one of the candidates for Third Murderer, and he could certainly “double” the role of both Third Murderer and one of the murderers of Lady Macduff and her son. The actor who played Ross might just as well play the messenger who warns Lady Macduff.
Macduff’s flight from Scotland and abandonment of his family are, of course, necessary for the plot and the play’s overall effect. His personal, specific experience of Macbeth’s tyranny gives the international military response emotional (as well as dynastic or political) meaning. But from that same inter-personal, psychologized, emotional, and ethical perspective, his actions are inexplicable, as Lady Macduff too bluntly tells Ross:
To leave his wife, to leave his babes,
His mansion, and his titles in a place
From whence himself does fly? He loves us not.
He wants the natural touch, for the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.
All is the fear, and nothing is the love;
As little is the wisdom, where the flight
So runs against all reason. (4.2.6-14)
And so Macduff’s flight proved unacceptable to the theatrical generation that followed Shakespeare’s. The Restoration adaptor of the play, Sir William Davenant, went to great pains to justify Macduff’s departure for England. Davenant’s main explanation was that Macduff wished to avoid killing Macbeth, an illegitimate king, but a king nonetheless; such an explanation would have been especially effective in a country and for an audience whose king (Charles I) had been executed a bare twenty years or so before. Whatever Davenant’s culturally determined difficulties (and his equally culturally determined solutions), Macduff’s flight poses a problem for any audience, and any performance, of Macbeth. And for most modern audiences, Davenant’s “solution” of the Macduff-problem has little power.
I don’t have an answer to this problem, though the play tries to find an answer in its most complicated, difficult, and in some ways most tedious scene, 4.3. ¬Palex ¬√Voyager √zPalex z~Voyager ~•Palex •¶Voyager ¶ªPalex ª¡Palex Ä¡ÕPalex ÕŒVoyager Œ˝Palex ˝˛Voyager ˛Palex Palex Ä-Palex -.Voyager .XPalex XYVoyager YsPalex ÄsÜPalex ÜáVoyager á±Palex ±≤Voyager ≤‹Palex ‹›Voyager ›˘Palex ˘¸Voyager ¸øPalex øΔPalex Δ&Palex &'Voyager '≈Palex
