Origin Stories of Fear and Tyranny: Blood and Dismemberment in Macbeth (with a Glance at the Oresteia)

"Who could exhaust the praise of this sublime work [Macbeth]? Since The Furies of Æschylus, nothing so grand and terrible has ever been composed."

A.W. Schlegel¹

"Fear takes many diverse forms and Aeschylean tragedy is uniquely rich in its power to represent fear, its symptoms, sources, objects and consequences. Macbeth is in this sense Shakespeare's most Aeschylean tragedy."

Adrian Poole²

Macbeth and the Oresteia both can be understood as origin stories, etiologies of important civic or national institutions: in the case of the Oresteia, the Areopagus, as well as the transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides, and their cult being located under the Areopagus (though Aeschylus places it nearer to Athena's statue); in the case of Macbeth, the feudal structure of inherited earls (and kings). As Malcolm says at the end of the play:

              My thanes and kinsmen,Henceforth be earls, the first that ever ScotlandIn such an honour named.

(5.9.28–30)³

The origin story as genre has a particular structure and temporality: "before" things were one way and then, usually after acts of horrifying violence, things change to being how they are "now." Such stories have a naturalizing force—this is how institutions or rulers are, or life is and will remain, with a suggestion that the past is irrecoverable—and yet they also allow a memory of what was with the possibility of an articulation of another story alongside the ending they present (see, for example, such varied origin stories as Ovid's etiologies of trees, birds, and flowers in Metamorphoses or Kipling's "How the Elephant Got Its Trunk").⁴

Macbeth and the Oresteia have many similarities, and it is not surprising that one of my two epigraphs is from a great nineteenth-century German philosopher while the other is from a recent critical volume. Only recently have Shakespeare scholars returned to the question, explored with enthusiasm a century or more ago, of Shakespeare's connection to the Greeks, especially Greek tragedy. In a recent essay on the two plays together, Earl Showerman reviews a large number of scholars since Gilbert Murray in 1914 who have noted the "peculiar" formal similarities between these two tragedies in particular while nonetheless asserting the unlikelihood of any direct connection between the two.⁵ Showerman lists the following as major areas of formal overlap and affinity if not allusion:⁶

• • Assassinations of Duncan and Agamemnon off stage, in the Greek manner;

• • Display of bloody knives after the assassination;

• • Motif of bloodstained, unclean hands;

• • Masculine queens capable of seductive equivocation;

• • Theme of the poisoned breast;

• • Sleeplessness and dream terrors requiring night lights;

• • Revenge-driven ghosts;

• • Fury-like chorus of Three Weird Sisters;

• • Allusions to the Gorgon;

• • Prophecy;

• • Insanity;

• • Porters;

• • Messenger speeches;

• • Stichomythic dialogue.

Recent work, most notably by Tanya Pollard, on the reception of and presence of Greek tragedy in sixteenth-century Europe through the framework of Greek-Latin bilingual editions has begun to change the landscape of expectation regarding Shakespeare and the Greeks.⁷ Pollard has shown that many ancient Greek plays were circulating widely in accessible forms. This essay does not address the question of whether the Oresteia was a specific source for Macbeth, but it would be a mistake to explore the close analogies between the plays without recognizing the Oresteia as a part of the intellectual landscape of late sixteenth-century and early Jacobean England, especially since George Buchanan was one of the mid-century translators. I quote at some length from Pollard:

The printing of Greek plays started in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, in response to excitement over growing access to Greek manuscripts and the Greek language brought by Byzantine scholars leaving Constantinople for the West. In 1495, a Florentine press brought out an edition of four plays by Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, and [Andromache]. Soon after, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published editions of Aristophanes in 1498, Sophocles in 1502, Euripides in 1503 [and his heirs that of Aeschylus in 1518], and other presses quickly...