ABSTRACT
Neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth shows any sign of repentance, and one of the dramatist's major problems was to prevent their being the monstrous figures of evil they seem to their enemies. His method was to insist, as so often before, on the 'mixed nature' of human beings and, by entering into their minds and letting them express their doubts and revulsions, to suggest that their evil behaviour was a wasteful misdirection of energy which might easily have been turned to good; so he preserves a modicum of sympathy for them even at their worst moments. He presents the paradox that however much Macbeth and Lady Macbeth try to dehumanize themselves, they cannot entirely do so. The soul of man, however low it falls, still retains (like Milton's Lucifer) some sparks of its divine origin; indeed damnation is made more grievous by the consciousness of loss. So Lady Macbeth wishes to unsex herself and become an embodiment of direst cruelty, yet she cannot murder Duncan; she suffers constant unease and perturbations of mind; she walks in her sleep, and kills herself. In Macbeth too, abused nature retaliates as his reason and freewill are sapped. He drops almost to the animal level; almost, but not quite, for his imagination never ceases to trouble him, and even when he likens himself to a bear tied to a stake (V. 7) he is not ignoble in his desperation; and when he meets Macduff he is surely sincere when he wishes not to fight him because 'my soul is too much charg'd / With blood of thine already' (V.7.34-5). Butcher though he is, he can no more than his wife destroy the bonds that tie him to humanity, and he lives to the last with an energy whose violence surpasses anything in Richard III, Julius Caesar, or Othello.
