ú This final scene opens as Macduff carries the body offstage while the triumphant allies enter. Ross, again the bearer of bad tidings, tells old Siward that his son “has paid a soldier’s debt.” The word “debt” would in the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s time have sounded like “death,” and Shakespeare has brought the two notions together before, in 1 Henry IV, where Prince Hal tells the cowardly Falstaff that he “owes God a death” – a debt that the wily and cowardly Falstaff is unwilling to pay, since it is “not due yet.” Brave young Siward, on the other hand, has proved his “worth” by becoming one of “God’s soldiers” and has “paid his score” to his master and country; and Malcolm vows to “spend” sorrow on him. The stoic old Siward also uses a play on words found in 1 Henry IV and likewise occasioned by a similarity in contemporary pronunciation, here between “hair” and “heir”: “Had I as many sons as I have hairs, | I would not wish them to a fairer death” (15-16). Clearly, young Siward’s death and old Siward’s stoicism present damning oppositions to Macbeth’s behavior and death.
Macduff enters with Macbeth’s severed head to proclaim Malcolm king. This gory picture offers a shockingly accurate emblem of Macbeth’s separation of desire from reason – like the Adam of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Macbeth has “resigned his manhood” and with it his moral and political integrity. And it reiterates the message of the traitors’ heads on pikes along London Bridge: death is the proper punishment for those who transgress against divinely instituted authority, whether in 11th-century Scotland or in the London of 1606. Malcolm’s concluding speech is regal in its firmness and generosity. He promises “to perform in measure, time, and place” that which is needed to heal Scotland’s ill. “By the grace of Grace,” King Malcolm vows to replant Scotland “newly with the time” (32), and he closes the play by inviting his newly created earls to his legitimate and sacramental coronation at Scone.
The tragedy seems then to conclude on a note of order, hope, and fresh growth, although Malcolm’s organic imagery disturbingly recalls Duncan’s generous promise to Macbeth: “I have begun to plant thee and will labor | To make thee full of growing” (1.4.28-29). Can we “look into the seeds of time” past the play’s formal ending to “say which grain will grow and which will not” (1.3.56-57)? Will the next cycle be one of generation or deterioration? And which process is truly “natural”? The provisional answer probably encompasses – in some delicately shifting ratio – both growth and decay, harmony and conflict, closure and lack of closure. We may, for instance, note and wonder at the absence of Fleance (and, indeed, several contemporary productions have placed him silent and brooding onstage), since somewhere in the future Banquo’s heirs, from whom the new Stuart monarch (dubiously) traced his own lineage, wait to fulfill their destiny as kings of Scotland. Nevertheless, dramatic, political, and moral composure seem to coincide in the play’s scripted ending. But Roman Polanski’s late 20th-century irony offers a haunting final filmic image – in the quintessential medium of our own century – that unsettles Shakespeare’s delicate Renaissance equilibrium: Polanski shows us a disgruntled Donaldbain limping away to seek the witches, presumably to reinaugurate the cycle of regicide and chaos.
Shakespeare’s Renaissance vision is not, I believe, quite so cynical – or perhaps his dramatic form and his political commonsense propose a firmer and more celebratory closure. In fiction endings are by definition different in kind – and reliability – from beginnings and middles. Even in the work of an artist as subtle and experimental as Shakespeare, conclusions are, I suspect, particularly vulnerable to the demands of propaganda (and scrutiny of censors) as well as to the aesthetic conveniences of tidiness and the desire of paying audiences for “poetic justice.” Nevertheless, in weighing the careful and provocative modulations of Macbeth’s last moments, we might do well to recall that Shakespeare’s own principal source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, reports that Donaldbain will in time kill the son and heir of his brother Malcolm. Thus, Polanski seems to call upon the dark medieval past to intensify his own pessimistic vision of the future. We live in a world of endemic violence and insistent malaise, and the Scottish play seems to open itself with special readiness to our bent vision. & Voyager ^Palex ^hPalex hPalex Palex IPalex IJVoyager JPalex Palex —Palex — ’Palex ’ ÿPalex ÿ ŸPalex @ Ÿ ÔPalex Ô Palex @ ¯Palex ¯ ˘Palex @ ˘ Palex Palex @ Palex Palex @ °Palex ° ¢Palex @ ¢ £Palex £ §Palex @ § ¨Palex ¨ ≠Palex @ ≠ ∏Palex ∏ πPalex @ π ≈Palex ≈ ΔPalex @ Δ
