SHAKESPEARE LECTURE

Macbeth and the Third

Person
ADRIAN POOLE

THERE ARE SOME terrible moments in Macbeth but none more terrible
than this, when one man has to break the news to another that his dear
ones have all been murdered:
Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered. To relate the manner
Were on the quarry of these murdered deer
To add the death of you. (4. 3. 2069)1

These two men are not alone; a third is present and listening, and it is he
who completes the line left suspended by the messengers words: To add
the death of you. Merciful heaven this third person cries. He urges
the bereaved man to give sorrow words, to be comforted and to dispute
it like a man with us. Lets make us medcines of our great
revenge / To cure this deadly grief. (4. 3. 21617.) To which the man
whose life of incurable grief is just beginning famously responds: He has
no children. (4. 3. 218.) We cannot tell for certain whom he means by
He whether the man who is trying to comfort him too promptly or
the man who has killed his children. He might have said Thou hast no
children, or You have no children, as Queen Margaret does to the men
who butcher her boy at Tewkesbury (The Third Part of Henry VI,

Read at the Academy 21 April 1999.

1
Quotations from Macbeth follow the New Cambridge edition by A. R. Braunmuller (Cambridge, 1997); all other quotations from Shakespeare are from the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.
Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).
Proceedings of the British Academy, 105, 7392. The British Academy 2000.

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Adrian Poole

5. 5. 63), but he does not. It is not the only occasion in Macbeth where it
is not clear who he is.2
Pronouns help us work out who we are, you are, they are, and their
singular equivalents. In the theatre pronouns acquire a radical urgency
because they are wrought into the conditions of performance. They
remind us at a less than fully conscious level that we are all performing
these pronouns all the time, whether we like it or not. The three men in
this scene do have names of their own: Ross, who brings the news;
Macduff who receives it; and Malcolm who listens and intervenes. But in
the theatre we do not hear these proper names as we hear the pronouns
that enact the relations between them: I, you, thou, he. We hear the name
of Macbeth many times in the scene, and the name of Old Siward twice,
and we hear words that refer to powerful forces, agents and domains by
which the speakers seek to orient themselves, their loyalties, their hopes
and fears: Heaven, Hell, Scotland, England, God, the Devil. The words
Heaven and Heavens are voiced with particular urgency in this scene,
which contains nine out of the twenty in the play as a whole, including the
king of Englands heavenly gift of prophecy (4. 3. 157). But the names
Ross and Malcolm are never uttered nor heard here because the speakers and addressees identify themselves and each other simply as I, Thou
or You,3 and We.
Macduff is different. His proper name is heard here twice, and the
occasions are significant. The first marks the pivotal moment when
Malcolm reveals that Macduff has passed the test hes been set. He has
distinguished himself from the mass of anonymous agents Macbeth has
been sending to Malcolm, and Malcolm honours him accordingly:
Macduff, this noble passion, / Child of integrity, hath from my soul /
Wiped the black scruples, . . . (4. 3. 11416). But there is a further noble
passion that Macduff must undergo in the second half of this scene. As

Many have noted for instance the uncertainty about the referents of the hes and hims
towards the end of the Captains description of the climactic encounter between brave Macbeth
and the merciless Macdonald: Till he faced the slave, / Which neer shook hands, nor bade
farewell to him, / Till he unseamed him from the nave to thchaps / And fixed his head upon the
battlements. (1. 2. 204.)
3
The second person singular has attracted a good deal of attention. A number of helpful contributions are to be found in A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama, ed. Vivian
Salmon and Edwina Burness (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1987), as for example Randolph Quirk,
Shakespeare and the English Language, pp. 710; Joan Mulholland, Thou and You in
Shakespeare: A Study in the Second Person Pronoun, pp. 15362; and Charles Barber, You
and Thou in Shakespeares Richard III, pp. 16380.

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the news of his familys annihilation begins to sink in, he marks with his
own name the first stabbings of guilt:
Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee. Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now.
(4. 3. 22630)

He tries to think of Heaven as lookers-on, witnesses, an audience, a divine

third person.4 For an instant he tries to blame them. The gods look
down, and this unnatural scene / They laugh at, exclaims Caius Martius
Coriolanus (5. 3. 1845), at the moment when he falls apart and surrenders to love for his dear ones. It is striking that the challenged manhood
of both men is associated with the idea of an uncaring audience above.
But Macduff promptly recoils from his shameful impulse and instead
accuses himself. Sinful Macduff: it was your fault, or rather swiftly
revising his pronouns I am to blame. Note the ethical drama embodied
in this quick turn of pronouns from the third person through the second
to the first: Heaven (third), Macduff (second), I (first). Macduff does have
an audience in the two men beside him, one of whom is keen to steady
and direct his shaken manhood: let grief / Convert to anger, urges
Malcolm (4. 3. 2312). Macduff pauses to recognise the part he could play
now: O, I could play the woman with mine eyes / And braggart with my
tongue. (4. 3. 2334). To play a part is to divide yourself and present a
third person as a first, to play the woman or the braggart (which is just
what Caius Martius loathes). For a moment Macduff contemplates the
double meanings of acting as playing and doing, in which Hamlet revels,
at which Martius shudders. But to play a part is not the same as to take a
part.5 This involves a different kind of commitment and risk, a matter as

For the idea that the heavens might be looking on this play both the events it portrays and
their performancesee Rosss words to the Old Man: Ha, good father, / Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with mans act, / Threatens his bloody stage (2. 4. 46). Consider also the following associations of heaven or the heavens with sight and knowledge: Nor heaven peep
through the blanket of the dark (1. 5. 53); heavens cherubin horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air (1. 7. 223); Theres husbandry in heaven, / Their candles are all out (2. 1. 4);
Heaven knows what she has known (5. 1. 41).
5
Taking a part and taking part carry the idea of commitment as playing a part does not; one
preserves the distinction between your self and your role, the other dissolves it. To take part
implies taking part in some collective activity, and/or taking sides in a quarrel, dispute or difference of opinion. Thus the Prince of Verona takes Romeos part in commuting his sentence of

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it might be of life and death, of whats done being done: Did heaven look
on, / And would not take their part? Whomever, whatever, Macduff
prays to the gentle heavens with the thou of impassioned invocation
heard so many times in this play, to let me take my part, just me and him:
But gentle heavens,
Cut short all intermission. Front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself; . . . (4. 3. 2346)

I shall come to this fiend by and by. But I begin with this scene because
it lies at the edge of the plays main action, and with these three men
because they belong to the mass of secondary characters who are often
described as grey and colourless, drained of interest for audience, readers,
even Shakespeare himself, by the all-absorbing Macbeths. A common
greyness silvers everything, says Brownings Andrea del Sarto.6 My concern will be with this greyness.
I want first to set some thoughts going about the third person,
through definition, connotation, and grammar. Let me briskly sketch a
spectrum of beliefs and practices surrounding this figure of the third from
the mundane to the mystical. At a mundane level there is the legal position of the third party, which is to say, A party or person besides the
two primarily concerned as in the third-party insurance familiar to cardrivers: insurance arranged against injury done to persons other than the
insured,7 bystanders for instance. At a rather more fabulous level, we may
think of the tripled daughters and sisters of myth and folk-tale, of whom
the third represents that which shall be, or in Freuds tragic scenario the
Goddess of Death in masquerade as Cordelia, Aphrodite, Cinderella and

death to banishment (Romeo and Juliet, 3. 3. 26), Mariana pleads with Isabella to take her part
before the Duke (Measure for Measure, 5. 1. 430), the Fool affects to mock Kent for taking ones
part thats out of favor (King Lear, 1. 4. 99), Lear bids the heavens send down, and take my
part (King Lear, 2. 4. 192), Edgar speaks of his tears beginning to take Lears part (King Lear,
3. 6. 60), and Prospero declares at the climax of The Tempest, Though with their high wrongs I
am strook to th quick, / Yet, with my nobler reason, gainst my fury / Do I take part. (5. 1. 257.)
6

The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. 5, ed. Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford,
1995), p. 264. Though I do not agree with all his judgements, I share Graham Bradshaws suspicion of the long-standing complaint that, as he puts it, the chameleon poet does not here display that prodigal, zestful, imaginative energy which endows even minor characters in, say,
Hamlet, with a rich dramatic existence. Bradshaw rightly contends that there is a clear relation
between the tendency to stabilise or flatten out character and the tendency to deflect the
Macbeth-terror by externalising order (Imaginative Openness and the Macbeth-Terror, in
Shakespeares Scepticism (Brighton, 1987), pp. 2234).
7
Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED): Third party.

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Psyche.8 Less paganly, we may think of the Holy Ghost as the Third
Person of the Trinity, or of Christ on the road to Emmaus, or of the
figure in T. S. Eliots What the Thunder Said: Who is the third who
walks always beside you?9 The figure of the third is always ominous,
whether of good or of ill, of black magic or white. When shall we three
meet again? Such a sociable question to open a play with, far from the
uncouth spirit in which a couple of humdrum murderers will later greet a
third accomplice: But who did bid thee join with us? (3. 3. 1.) It is none
the less always portentous and pregnant, this shadow of the third and the
three it makes up, whatever the issue it bodes.10
We might also think of the superstitious ideas of third bodily organs.
Apart from our fingers and toes, we mainly think of our basic corporeal
endowment in terms of ones and twos. We normally greet with alarm the
idea of two heads or three nostrils. To have a third nipple was no joke in
Shakespeares time, but a matter of life or death for those suspected of
witchcraft. Macbeth makes a nervous joke in response to the Second
Apparition, the bloody child who cries: Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth,
to which Macbeth replies: Had I three ears, Id hear thee. (4. 1. 77.) But
this play holds so many triple happenings and utterances that perhaps
one does need a third ear. So psychoanalysis would have us believe when
it speaks of a third ear which listens intuitively for what lies behind the
words heard by the actual ears. Or perhaps one needs the third eye
familiar to Hindu and Buddhist belief, the eye of insight or destruction
located in the middle of the forehead of the god Siva; hence transf., the
power of inward or intuitive sight occasionally gained by humans
(OED: Third, a., 5). We might also pause over the figurative usage, now
obsolete, of a third tongue to mean a backbiter, slanderer, or as one
might say, a false witness who maketh debate between a man and his

8
Sigmund Freud, The Theme of the Three Caskets (1913), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey, vol. 12 (1958). The Weird Sisters of Macbeth have
of course frequently been associated with the three Fates of classical myth and the three Norns
of Germanic myth. Of the latter it is notable that they hold sway over different tenses, Urd being
concerned with the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future (Larousse World Mythology,
ed. Pierre Grimal, trans. Patricia Beardsworth (1973), p. 392). Good stagings of Macbeth, such
as Trevor Nunns acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company production (19768), often distinguish
the Third Witch from her sisters by stressing her identification with the crowning future tense.
9
The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1969), p. 73.
10
See amongst others T. McAlindon, Shakespeares Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge, 1991), pp.
2008. McAlindon observes of the ambivalence of the number three in the Christian tradition,
its association both with good power and with bad, that witchcraft, like devilry, is a rival system which parodies what it seeks to overthrow (p. 205).

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neighbour.11 Or between a husband and wife, so that one might think of

Iago as exactly the third tongue, who comes between Othello and
Desdemona.
My own emphasis here is on the ethical significance of this figure, its
position and its potentialities. The third person may stand at the edge of
the scene, a bystander and looker-on, like so many attendant lords and
servants. But I am particularly interested in the moment when such a figure comes forward and steps into a scene between two (or more) others.
Of course he or she or they may signally fail to do so; or they may be positively turned away and ejected, no longer one of us, to speak and be spoken to, but only spoken about. My concern is with the grammar of these
motions in performance on stage not just of entrances and exits as
such, but of their ethical meanings, for the individuals and the world they
help to make or mar by such actions, in situations where to do nothing is
itself a choice. Not that the choice is always a free one, to take a part or
not. Did you choose to be there in the first place? As one might ask the
Theban shepherd in Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, who witnessed the
murder at the crossroads, or the sentry in Antigone who witnessed the girl
trying to bury her brothers body; from whom the answer would be no,
not exactly my choice, just doing my job. So we need to be alive to the
conditions of power and helplessness out of which these figures make
their entrance on the scene in the first place. At one end of the spectrum
are the figures of supreme authority, worldly and divine, who intervene to
settle disputes and dispense judgments, like the Duke at the end of Measure for Measure, who has been a looker-on here in Vienna (5. 1. 317); at
the other is the figure of the child, who comes between the mother and
father, as the child unborn and then cast away comes between Hermione
and Leontes in The Winters Tale. This figure harbours the power of the
future, to redeem and to heal, as Perdita does; in tragedy it comes back
with a vengeance, like the bloody child in Macbeth, like Orestes and
Oedipus.
In grammar, the third person distinguishes the position of a person or
thing or entity, singular or plural, excluded from direct participation in a
speech-act. Note this however, from Stephen C. Levinson in his helpful
book, Pragmatics: third person is quite unlike first or second person, in
that it does not correspond to any specific participant-role in the speech

11
The OED here cites Wyclif (1388) and refers to renderings by Wyclif and Coverdale of the lingua tertia of the Vulgate.

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event.12 In other words, unlike the first or second person, the third person occupies in principle a limitless domain, within which all kinds of
position and predicament are possible. You might, as it were, be within
touching distance of a speaker and an addressee, just behind or between
them, or you might be on the other side of the world, or in another one.
And this is merely to speak topographically. There are all kinds of ways
of including and excluding the person or persons we are not directly talking to.
When we consider the onlookers on the Shakespearian stage, we could
try to make a rough distinction between spectators and witnesses. We
could think of these figures as spectators when there is a more or less clear
line of demarcation separating them from what they are looking at (as we
say) or looking on (as the Shakespearian usage notably prefers). Obvious
examples would be the plays-within-plays in A Midsummer Nights
Dream and Hamlet, or the masque in The Tempest. And we could think
of these figures as witnesses when they are on the edge of an action from
which they are not clearly separated, when a decision of some kind is
required from them to see or not to see, to speak or be silent, to intervene or turn away. Yet such a distinction between spectator and witness is
impossible to maintain, certainly in the theatres for which Shakespeare
wrote, where the boundary separating the players from the lookers-on is
not hard and fast, but soft, beguiling, treacherous, and challenging. This
is true both for the watchers and witnesses within the fiction think of
Troilus and Ulysses and Thersites watching Cressida and Diomede13 and
for the audiences supposedly outside it.
Consider these three examples of different kinds of witness. First,
the men who stood by and watched the three York brothers stab the Lancastrian Edward Prince of Wales in front of his mother, Queen Margaret.
At least this is how Margaret recalls in Richard III the horrific scene near
the end of the previous play in the history cycle (The Third Part of Henry
VI, 5. 5), when she curses Rivers, Dorset, and Hastings: you were
standers-by, / . . . when my son / Was stabbd with bloody daggers
(Richard III, 1. 3. 20911).14

12

Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge, 1983), p. 69.

Troilus and Cressida, 5. 2.
14
There is confusion here, as there is bound to be in such cases. Hershel Baker notes that
Edward Hall names Dorset and Hastings as parties to Prince Edwards murder (Riverside
Shakespeare, p. 719). Shakespeares own staging of the gang-murder specifies no named figures
apart from the York brothers themselves (The Third Part of Henry VI, 5. 5), though modern
13

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Secondly, the servant in King Lear who intervenes to try and stop
Regan and his master Cornwall from blinding Gloucesters other eye
(3. 7). He is not quick enough to save the first eye, and he is not a sufficiently skilful fighter to save the second, nor to save his own life.
When Albany hears the news that Cornwall has died from this
mans brave intervention, he exclaims, This shows you are above, / You
justicers (4. 2. 789).15 It does nothing of the sort. Unlike heaven,
Cornwalls servant does look on and does take a part. Thrilld with
remorse (4. 3. 73), he dies for justice, a nobody, a pronoun, a man
without character.
Lastly, Emilia in Othello. I have in mind the scene in which Othello
and Desdemona have their First Marital Row (3. 4). Othello upbraids
Desdemona for losing the precious handkerchief, while Desdemona
pleads, with the worst of timing, for the disgraced Cassio. And Emilia
looks on in silence. It is a pained silence for sure, given the levity with
which she has picked the handkerchief up not exactly stealing it and
passed it to Iago (What he will do with it / Heaven knows, not I
(3. 3. 2978)), and given the swift pang of remorse for this disloyalty to
her mistress (Poor lady, shell run mad / When she shall lack it
(3. 3. 31718), and the abrupt command to keep her mouth shut (Be not
acknown ont (3. 3. 319), from the husband whom tis proper she obey
(5. 2. 196). Whats done cannot be undone, and now she is complicit in
she knows not what. If her silence is cowardice, she makes brave reparation when she breaks it at last, too late to prevent a monstrous crime, but
in time to take the part of her mistress against her husband, and like

stagings unconstrained by problems of doubling may choose to include them (especially

Hastings, whose presence is explicit in 4. 7 and 5. 7), and modern editions reasonably supply the
soldiers who must be in attendance to escort Oxford and Somerset off to their deaths and the
Prince on to his, and to bear the Queen hence, in response to Edwards commands. In Richard
III Shakespeare further complicates matters by making Grey identify himself and Vaughan
along with Rivers as the objects of Margarets curse for standing by, as the three of them go to
their execution (3. 3. 1517). Considering the case of Rivers, as represented in the Mirror for
Magistrates and taken over by Shakespeare, M. M. Mahood writes well of the story the dramatist makes for him, in terms that bear closely on my own argument: Rivers last words are those
of a good man. But he is also an appeaser, who failed his prince in being all too ready to lay aside
his halberd at Richards command. (Bit Parts in Shakespeares Plays (Cambridge, 1991), p. 100;
reprinted as Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare (1998)).
15

The Iustisers come from the corrected First Quarto (1608); otherwise they are Iustices, in
F1, Q1 uncorrected, Q2 (The Parallel King Lear 16081623, prepared by Michael Warren
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1989), p. 102).

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Cornwalls servant to pay with her own life for this rebellious act of
justice.16
Let me here spell out the hint I gave earlier about the grammar of acting. Imagine yourself as an actor on stage. At any moment you are going
to be in one of three playing positions. You are either doing something
(which includes speaking); or you are having something done to you
(which includes being directly addressed by another speaker); or you are
in neither of these positions, but ready and waiting to enter one of the
other two, or to exit from the stage altogether. In other words, for the time
beingand the time may stretch from an instant to eternity you are a
first person, a second person or a third person. But of course these are
not fixed positions. As a third person you may be out of the firing line or
the conversation, but you are not safe. You are neither here nor there but
both at once. And on the tragic stage, you are likely to be marked for life:
like the Theban shepherd who was at the cross-roads the day Oedipus
killed his father, or like the bystanders who watched the Lancastrian
Prince Edward being murdered in front of his mother.
Returning to Macbeth I want to train my attention on Ross. Harley
Granville Barker tells us that in the stock-company tradition of the nineteenth century, the role of Ross was considered the last insult that could
be offered to a responsible actor.17 Kenneth Muir has a delightfully dry
footnote recording the efforts of one late-nineteenth-century reader to
spice the part up:
the ingenious Libby . . . [who] demonstrated to his own satisfaction that Ross is
the real villain of the play, who first gets the Thane of Cawdor executed on a
false charge of treachery, then murders Banquo, disguised as the Third Murderer, is Macbeths agent in the murder of Macduffs family, and then, seeing

16

In recent years the part has been memorably taken on the British stage by Zo Wanamaker
partnering Ian McKellens Iago in the Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by
Trevor Nunn (1989), and by Maureen Beattie opposite Simon Russell Beales Iago in the Royal
National Theatre production directed by Sam Mendes (19978).
17
Preface to Macbeth (1923), in Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 6 (1974), p. 83. Granville Barker
notes that the part is threaded more consecutively through the play than any other, but he conceives of the character as emotionally untouched, a kind of silent or smoothly speaking and
cynical chorus, the plays taciturn raisonneur (pp. 83-4). Thomas Wheelers Macbeth: An Annotated Bibliography (The Garland Shakespeare Bibliographies, no. 22: New York and London,
1990), has a number of entries about Ross (and Lennox, who attracts some comparable interest).
See in particular Normand Berlin, Ross in Macbeth, Neophilologus, 58 (1974), 41123, and
Camille Wells Slights, Cases of Conscience in Shakespeares Tragedies, in The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert and Milton (Princeton, 1981), pp. 67132.

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that Macbeths power is on the wane, [he] deserts to Malcolm and is rewarded
with an earldom.18

In defence of the hapless Libby, one may say that his theory is quite effectively acted out by John Stride in Roman Polanskis 1971 film, and that at
least it is less implausible than the idea that Macduff deliberately sacrifices his family as a way of guaranteeing his loyalty to Malcolm, let alone
the allegation that Fleance is Lady Macbeths child by Banquo, and so
on.19 In the theatre most audiences will barely distinguish Ross from the
other lords from the Angus we first see him with attending on Macbeth
and Banquo, from the Lennox and Macduff with whom he silently
attends on Duncans entrance to the Macbeths castle, from the Lennox
with whom he enters, together with Macbeth, just after Macbeth has
stabbed Duncans servants to death. Ross might seem to emerge more distinctly in the following scene with the nameless Old Man (2. 4). But we
shall be hard put to remember what his name is. We have no such difficulty with Macduffs name because Ross (or whoever he is) says helpfully:
Here comes the good Macduff (2. 4. 20). But Ross himself is harder to
recognise. On his arrival at the English court, Malcolms first reaction is
marked by the words: My countryman, but yet I know him not.
(4. 3. 162.) In fact the only time in the play when the name Ross is heard
by the actual ears is on the mans very first entrance. Who comes here?
asks Duncan and Malcolm replies: The worthy Thane of Ross. (1. 2. 45.)
If it were not for that very first naming, this man would be anonymous,
and to the audience in performance he is almost all pronoun. This
is exactly the fate of his colleagues Angus, Lennox, Menteith, and
Caithness, whose names are never heard in the theatre any more than are

18
Introduction to his Arden edition (1951), p. xlvii, referring to M. F. Libby, Some New Notes
on Macbeth (Toronto, 1893). Jan H. Blits notes that Rosss actions, often puzzling, are especially mysterious in the scene with Lady Macduff (The Insufficiency of Virtue: Macbeth and the
Natural Order (New York, 1996), p. 147), and he offers some support to the credibility of Libbys
explanation of Rosss actions in the next scene in the English court, 4. 3 (p. 159). Braunmuller
notes that according to Holinshed the historical Ross was executed during the ten-year period
of Macbeths reign as a good king (New Cambridge edition, p. 101).
19
William Empson writes: I believe that the various muddles which have occupied the minds of
critics (the kind of thing which allowed the Victorian Libby to produce a rather impressive argument that Ross was the villain all through) were deliberately planned to keep the audience guessing but fogged (Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (1986), p. 144). For the idea of
Macduffs villainy, see Franco Ferrucci, Macbeth and the Imitation of Evil, in The Poetics
of Disguise: The Autobiography of the Work in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, trans. Ann
Dunnigan (Ithaca, 1980), pp 12558; and for the theory of Fleances parentage, see Julia Sheilds,
Fair is Foul, English Journal, 70 (March 1981), 545.

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those of the three witches, the captain, the porter, both doctors, the old
man, a lord, Lady Macbeths gentlewoman, the Macduffs wee boy,
Macduffs wife and even, for that matter, Lady Macbeth.20 Yet to his fellow beings Ross is a familiar person, and to the Macduff family he is
something more than this. He calls Lady Macduff, My dearest coz
(4. 2. 14) and her son, My pretty cousin (4. 2. 25), and if Malcolm does
not instantly recognise him at the English court, Macduff certainly does
and greets him with notable warmth, My ever gentle cousin (4. 3. 163).21
This is what matters about Ross, that the lack of his hold on a name of
his own throws into relief the relations he stands in to others, and his
readiness to act on them and take a part.
The case of Ross is less clear-cut than Emilias in Othello, but it presents some parallels to it. The key moment is the scene where he counsels
Lady Macduff to be patient and school herself in her husbands absence
(4. 2. 129). He does not advise her to run for her life with her children,
as the homely man does a few minutes later, sadly too late.22 It is hard
not to feel that this is exactly what Ross ought to have done, instead of
counselling a stoicism of no practical use in the circumstances, a faith in
her husbands judgement of The fits oth season that is quite misplaced
(4. 2. 1517), and a trust in the commonplace that Things at the worst
will cease, or else climb upward / To what they were before (4. 2. 245),
which as Edgar would have told her is dangerous nonsense, for the worst
is not / So long as we can say, This is the worst (King Lear, 4. 1. 278).
20

Barbara Everett notes Lady Macbeths lack of a first name, in the course of remarking how
few characters the play contains (Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeares Tragedies (Oxford,
1989), p. 98). Jan H. Blits comments on the namelessness of so many figures, including the Lady
Macduff created by editors; in the Folio she is named on her entrance in 4. 2 as Macduffes Wife
and her speech-heading throughout the scene is Wife (The Insufficiency of Virtue, p. 206). For
a lively piece on speech-tags which supports this line of thought, see Random Cloud, The very
names of the Persons: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character, in Staging the
Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and
Peter Stallybrass (1991), pp. 8896.
21
Cousin is a sociable form of address, a way of claiming or conferring kinship, or the sense of
it. Thus Duncan exclaims of Macbeth: O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman (1. 2. 24), and greets
him with O worthiest cousin (1. 4. 14); Banquo calls Ross and Angus Cousins (1. 3. 126);
Macbeth calls Malcolm and Donalbain our bloody cousins (3. 1. 31); Malcolm addresses his
fellow warriors (Siward, Macduff et al.), as Cousins (5. 4. 1), and calls Young Siward, to his
father, my cousin your right noble son (5. 6. 3).
22
Though Bradshaw gives a forceful account of the Macduff marriage, including an unusually
severe view of Lady Macduff, I cannot agree with his reading of her exchanges with these two
men, that they both risk their lives in trying to persuade her to take her children away . . . but
she will do nothing but talk (Shakespeares Scepticism, p. 238). Ross counsels patience; the
homely man counsels action.

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It is instructive that Libby and Polanski have been able to seize on Rosss
feebleness to make him a right villain, but this is a morally comfortable
move. Ross is guilty, but his guilt is more ordinary than this.23 When he
brings the news of the familys annihilation to Macduff, the utterance of
this terrible deed is for him both a punishment and a means of reparation.
Both Ross and Macduff will feel for ever that they could have averted the
massacre: Did heaven look on, / And would not take their part? But I
failed them, and so did you: we cannot but hear these unspoken words
pass between the two men. If the final act is merciful in allowing Macduff
to take the part of justice, it also grants Ross a chance to make further
amends for his complicity in the Macduff massacre. Once more he
becomes the messenger of death, but now at last he can report a good
death with a clear conscience, that of Young Siward, who only lived but
till he was a man, / The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed / In
the unshrinking station where he fought, / But like a man he died.
(5. 9. 69.) This is good timing, both the dying and its telling, though it is
shadowed by the thought that the moment of reaching manhood might
be just the proper time to die.24
I turn again to questions of grammar, to the little words this and
that, and their importance to sociability. The opening scenes of Macbeth
are much concerned with friends and foes and the brutal need to distinguish between them. We watch the convulsions of a social body pulling
itself together as the alien invader is repelled and the traitor in our midst
is expelledthe Cawdor who was not after all one of us, but one of them.
The gathering can be heard in the micro-drama of deictics. Consider this
sequence. What bloody man is that? asks Duncan (1. 2. 1). He does not
say what bloody man is this?, as he might have. But Malcolm does make

23

Camille Wells Slights takes Macduffs dilemma in choosing between his family and his country as a model for the morally similar, if personally less terrible predicaments, in which all the
characters find themselves: Banquo, Rosse, and Lennox also have to decide how to act in circumstances where good and evil, falsehood and truth are hard to distinguish and where moral
issues cannot be obvious. In the minor characters, the focus is on the difficulty of decision rather
than the correctness of choice. (The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert and
Milton, p. 123).
24
Rosss absence from Malcolms entourage in the scenes leading up to the final battle (5. 2 and
5. 4) has occasioned comment. Why is he never there for the real fighting? Why does he only turn
up when the hurly burlys done? (Lennox too goes missing from 5. 4, though he is named and
speaks in 5. 2). Nicholas Brooke suggests that the answer may well be found in the exigencies of
doubling, the actor playing Ross being needed for the Doctor and/or Young Siward and the one
playing Lennox for Old Siward: see the introduction to his edition (Oxford, 1990), pp. 856, and
his note to the stage-directions heading 5. 4, p. 201.

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the move from that to this when he answers: This is the sergeant
(1. 2. 3). And he goes on to address the newcomer with the notably warm
and egalitarian welcome: Hail, brave friend (1. 2. 5). There is a great deal
of hailing and all hailing in the play, but this is the only occasion on
which it is coupled with friend. Note the sequence that, this, thou:
from third person distal (that), to third person proximal (this), to second person address. The terms distal and proximal come from linguistics, and they mark a good deal more than meets the naked ear. The shifts
from that to this or from this to that mark tiny but critical changes
of climate, temperature and ambience little welcomes and rebuffs, concertings and disjointings.25 The excitement of the Captains narration naturally induces him and his listeners to use this and these when he might
have used that and those: No sooner justice had, with valour
armed, / Compelled these skipping kerns to trust their heels (1. 2. 2930);
Dismayed not this our captains, Macbeth and Banquo? (1. 2. 34). This
is typical of messenger speeches, that the excitement of their performance
turns things which were that and there and then into this and here and
now. Note conversely the way Banquo keeps at bay the excitement of the
witches predictions, by choosing a disowning that rather than a complicit this, when he responds to Macbeths Do you not hope your children shall be kings, . . .? (1. 3. 117), with That trusted home, / Might yet
enkindle you unto the crown (1. 3. 119).
There is a particular edge to this and that in this play. Both point to
a third person or thing, but that draws a line between me and it or us and
them: he, she, it or they, lie beyond or outside some notional boundary
that, there, then (the spatial and temporal markers clearly go with it).
This on the other hand draws a line on the far side of him, her, it or
them, who is within reach or touch or sight or hearing or memory this,
here, now. To ask Is this a dagger that I see before me? presumes the possibility of touching it, as to ask Is that a dagger that I see before me?
does not. At the end of the play this butcher and his fiend-like queen
(5. 9. 36) are still too close to have turned (as they will) into that butcher
and his fiend-like queen. Unlike that most disloyal traitor (1. 2. 52),
that Thane of Cawdor (1. 2. 63), in the opening scenes, who is already
history, as we say. But Malcolm can point to the severed head of this
Thane of Cawdor, here and now for all to see, as his father never could to
that.

25

John Lyonss term for this is empathetic deixis, cited by Levinson, Pragmatics, p. 81.

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There is a little turn of phrase in which this play is revealingly rich: the
pronominal formula that which. This indicates the existence of something while refusing to tell you what it is, as when Hamlet declares that he
has that within which passes show, in strongly marked contrast to
These but the trappings and the suits of woe (Hamlet, 1. 2. 856). In
Macbeth the cumulative effect of that which creates a sense of things
beyond our grasp that are at once within and without and all round
about. The phrase does not carry much stress when Lady Macbeth says,
That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold (2. 2. 1). But in
other cases it casts an aura of fearful desire or superstition round the
thing it marks or indicates. Consider these examples.
(i) Macbeth: Let not light see my black and deep desires,
The eye wink at the hand. Yet let that be,
Which the eye fears when it is done to see. (1. 4. 513)
(ii) Lady Macbeth: Thoudst have, great Glamis,
That which cries, Thus thou must do if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do,
Than wishest should be undone. (1. 5. 202)
(iii) Malcolm (to Macduff):
That which you are, my thoughts cannot transpose;
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. (4. 3. 212)
(iv) Gentlewoman (refusing the Doctors request to tell him what she has heard
Lady Macbeth say in her sleepwalking):
That, sir, which I will not report after her. (5. 1. 12)

In every case, there is a refusal to name that a something that lies out
of reach, beyond.26
There is however one occasion in the play and one alone when the
speaker deliberately pauses to specify the that which he might have
glossed over:
My way of life
Is falln into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
I must not look to have; . . . (5. 3. 226)

26

Further examples include Lady Macbeths Wouldst thou have that / Which thou esteemst the
ornament of life (1. 7. 412), and Tis safer to be that which we destroy / Than by destruction
dwell in doubtful joy (3. 2. 67); Macbeths Ay, and a bold one, that dare not look on
that / Which might appal the devil (3. 4. 589), and I conjure you by that which you profess
(4. 1. 49), and the last messengers Gracious my lord, / I should report that which I say I saw
(5. 5. 2930).

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But I have of course missed out a line. That which Macbeth utters here so
unforgettably is this:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; . . .

From what an unearthly distance this man contemplates the things that
might have made life worth living, that are now irretrievable third person
nouns, never to be lived between you and me. Wilt thou obey him, and
serve him, love, honour and keep him in sickness and in health? the Priest
asks the Woman, or used to. As for the troops of friends, the great model
in Shakespeares own time was provided by the witnesses to marriage,
those friends and neighbours described in the Book of Common Prayer
and addressed by the Priest: Dearly beloved, we are gathered together
here in the sight of God . . .. But the Macbeths are death to such gatherings; they displace the mirth and break the good meeting, to put it mildly.
I borrow some words from Lady Macbeth in the banquet scene and
this brings me to our dear friend Banquo, as the newly crowned
Macbeth calls him (3. 4. 90). A king may have loyal subjects but he can
have no true friends. He is all I and We, and strain as he may to address
others as second persons, they remain as out of reach to him as he does
to them, whether in person (Your highness, your majesty), or behind
his back (He thats coming must be provided for (1. 5. 645)).27 Think of
that bluntest of verdicts on King Richard III before Bosworth Field: He
hath no friends but what are friends for fear (Richard III, 5. 2. 20); or of
King Richard IIs plaintive confession that I live with bread like you, feel
want, / Taste grief, need friends (3. 2. 1756). In terms of the grammar
with which I am concerned, the figure of the friend is one which moves
freely between third and second persons from him or her to you and
back againmore freely than the figure of the beloved, who is either triumphantly mine or dejectedly his or hers, either you in ecstatic welcome or she or he in despairing farewell (She should have died
hereafter (5. 5. 16)). It is no more easy to draw a firm line between friendship and love than between this and that, and there is a potential rivalry
between Banquo and Lady Macbeth for Macbeths love and friendship.

27

Meditating on Duncans canniness, Bradshaw notes the way he bids for the Macbeths continuing affection and loyalty (1. 6. 2830) with a nice shift of pronouns from the flatteringly intimate me and mine to the promisingly regal we and our (Shakespeares Scepticism,
pp. 2489).

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Alone on stage Banquo addresses Macbeth with a Thou which echoes

the passionate vocatives with which Lady Macbeth first invokes her husbands presence: Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou
art promised (1. 5. 1314); Thou hast it now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all
(3. 1. 1).28 Macbeths is not just the story of the man who kills his king;
it is also, and dare one say it, even more centrally the story of the man
who destroys the love and friendship embodied in his wife and Banquo.
One does dare say it, because puzzling as it has seemed to some, it is
indeed the murder of Banquo that occupies prime time and space at the
heart of the play, in the sequence of three murders that begins with
Duncan and the two grooms and concludes with Macduffs wife,
children, servants, all.29 And it is the great central feast of rejoicing at
which we witness this double divorce, along with the witnesses on stage,
the company of all the Macbeths friends.30 Banquo is the epitome of
the friendship that the Macbeths destroy, antithesis of the false friend
Iago, owner of the good third tongue on which the health of a whole
little world should rely.
In a sense we may say that third persons have been less than real to the
Macbeths because they have addressed each other so intensely and exclusively.31 Everyone else has always been those people coming to stay the
night rather than these people. Their tragedy is registered in a dire failure with the pronouns and deictics that we need to make distinctions, distinctions between treating others as a second person and as a third,

28

For Thou and You, see above, n. 3. Macbeth and Banquo normally address each other with
an unmarked you as befits social equals on easy terms, though once Macbeth is crowned king,
Banquo becomes properly punctilious with his your highness, my lord, and my good lord
(3. 1. 1141). They never use the marked or impassioned thou to each others living faces;
Banquo opens this scene by addressing the absent Macbeth as Thou and Macbeth closes it by
returning the compliment: Banquo, thy souls flight, / If it find heaven, must find it out tonight.
(3. 1. 1401). But the thous erupt in Macbeths mouth with a vengeance when he is confronted
by Banquos Ghost: Thou canst not say I did it; never shake / Thy gory locks at me! (3. 4. 501),
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too (3. 4. 70), and so on.
29
It goes without saying that this does not make the murder of Banquo more important than
those which precede or succeed it. There is special weight and significance to all three positions
in a sequence of three, and the three murderous events are carefully distinguished from each
other.
30
The play uses the words friend and friends more tellingly than frequently; but there is a certain concentration in this central scene, five occurrences out of the plays total of fifteen.
31
Though I do not agree that the play is extremely bare in human relationship, as Barbara
Everett puts it, I share her view of the Macbeths marriage: The two Macbeths between them
sacrifice every other possibility of relationship that might have opened round them. (Young
Hamlet, p. 102.)

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between socializing them as a this third person, and strangering them as

a that. The living human body will move freely from one to the other
and back again, whether family, society, or individual. The Macbeths do
not. Their deictic pronominal systems rigidify and then quiver uncontrollably and finally collapse. Think of the collapse of temporal deictics
represented by Macbeths famous: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow (5. 5. 18). Instead of, as it should be, Yesterday, and today,
and tomorrow.32 But let the frame of things disjoint, Macbeth exclaims
(3. 2. 16). But it is we who do the disjointing: you and I and he and she.
In conclusion I want to consider the third person or persons unknown
who look on at the play with apparent impunity: the audience who are us,
or them, or even possibly him above, as the anonymous lord rather offhandedly nods up at God, in colloquy with Lennox (3. 6. 32). I want to draw
briefly on an important argument by Katharine Eisaman Maus about
witnesses, confession, and judgment in the law-courts of Shakespeares
time, and the problematic development of ideas of inwardness. I am
going to quote a passage in which Maus is reflecting on the theatricality
of Richard of Gloucester and other stage machiavels (as she calls them),
and the special relation they establish with an audience. We the audience,
she says, are confident that Richard exposes to us the true inner self he
conceals from the others on stage.
The theatrical situation, distinguishing sharply between the privileged viewpoint of the theater spectators and the impercipience of onstage colleagues, is
thus a convenience for the machiavels, allowing them both audience and scope
for action. Yet the same situation reproduces the Christian providential scheme
the machiavel defies, with its contrast between divine omniscience and mortal
myopia. The fact that the machiavels machinations are witnessed guarantees
both our delight and his undoing. . . . The almost reassuring, comic quality of
many stage machiavels as they plot their cruelties is entirely consistent with the
fantasies of immunity and omniscience theatergoers are encouraged to entertain, as we are given safe, enticingly godlike access to fictional hiddenness . . . .
In Richard III Shakespeare puts us not only on Gods side but in Gods place,
in the position of the high all-seer in the providential drama of history.33

32

In English at least, though in Hindi it would be simpler, as the same word does for yesterday
and tomorrow, and in Japanese it would be more complicated because there are words for the
three days before today and for the two after (Levinson, Pragmatics, p. 75). Francis Barker
amongst others has remarked on the obsessive marking of time in the play: as many such temporal deictics can surely hardly be equalled in a work of this type and length (The Culture of
Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester, 1993), p. 61).
33
Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1995), p. 54.

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Now Richard III is not Macbeth, and the words reassuring, comic quality, and indeed stage machiavel apply more happily to the earlier play
than to the later, for all that Macbeth may gesture towards a divine providential viewpoint congenial to the reigning monarch and patron of
Shakespeares company. But even for Richard III Mauss position is easier
to sustain in the study than in the theatre. Against the fantasies of our
immunity and omniscience, we need to set the ordeals of the several witnesses whom we ourselves witness within the play. Our onstage colleagues in Richard III are not uniformly dupes and gulls; Richards
antagonists are not all equally deceived. Clarence is, and Hastings, and so
is Lady Anne but then she is undeceived; Buckingham is undeceived
and still loses out; Queen Margaret, the Duchess of York, and Queen
Elizabeth are not deceived for a moment, though the last may pretend to
be; Stanley is clear-sighted and canny throughout. In performance we
eagerly look on the choices made by all these secondary and tertiary figures, no less than we look on the primary agents.34 We look on them for
signs of our own capacity in the face of power, for pity and terror and
anger, for courage and cowardice, for insight and blindness.
Let me glance at another critic whose arguments sharpen this issue. In
the theatre, Harry Berger contends, we succumb all too easily to the spell
of illusion, the power of ritual, the charisma of performance.35 It is only
in reading that we keep our cool and sufficient distance to resist these
illusions and analyse the means by which they are wrought. Take Macbeth:
in performance an audience is hard put to resist the force of all the Christian cosmologising, all the talk of good and evil, of witches and ghosts,
of a natural order violated and restored. But the reader can see through
this mumbo-jumbo to the murderous rivalry on which the world of the
play is really based, and by which all the men are corrupted. As readers
we can perceive Banquos silent complicity in Duncans murder, a complicity repeated by Ross and Macduff, and the other Scottish lords. And
the reader can see the witches for the superficial scapegoats they are,

34
For this whole topic Mahood provides invaluable stimulus in Bit Parts in Shakespeares Plays,
reprinted as Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare.
35
Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
Oxford, 1989), and Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, 1997). The latter contains two challenging essays on Macbeth: The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation (1980), and Text against Performance in Shakespeare:
The Example of Macbeth (1982).

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grotesques, shrunken figures of evil who are as comical as they are

sinister.36
So according to Berger it is the reader rather than the spectator who
has safe, enticingly godlike access to fictional hiddennessand to the
means by which fictions hide themselves. The spectator is simply a credulous dolt who must graduate to become a reader, while the reader in
turn, but more easily, awakens to his complicity as a spectator.37 Berger
marches bravely backwards to the truth from which one might prefer to
start, that the spectator and the reader in us can never be cleanly distinguished but are always, to accept his useful term, complicit that is,
complicit with each other and with that which they attend. Some words of
William Empson remind us of the fog in which Macbeth takes place, for
the audience as for its characters. It would be comforting to believe that
the play was once longer, and that what we have now is a cut version of
a tidy historical play now unfortunately lost. But this, Empson says, is a
classic dodge to avoid the plays power to embroil its witnesses: it is a
rather massive effort, very consistently carried out, to convey the
immense confusion in which these historical events actually occur.38
One may hope that Harry Berger is grateful for the blessing recently
conferred on him by Harold Bloom.39 Bloom writes with unabashable
zeal as the supreme reader for whom all those other people, on stage or in
the auditorium, are merely a distraction. He writes: Shakespeare rather

36

Making Trifles of Terrors, p. 116. Berger goes on to describe the witches as bemonstered manlike images of the feminine power that threatens throughout the play to disarm the pathologically protective machismo essential to the warrior society (p. 116).
37
Making Trifles of Terrors, p. 125.
38
William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge, 1986), p. 146.
Another way of considering the plays purposive confusion is suggested by Huston Diehl, who
describes the good reasons a Renaissance audience would have had for feeling implicated in the
problematics of vision: Because the human world is a world of shadows where images may be
Gods signs or the devils illusions, man must continually engage in the act of interpretation. . . . The images of the play demand interpretation, but they are confusing, ambiguous, and
seem to defy interpretation. The ambiguity of these visions is experienced by characters and
audience alike; both share the condition of seeing through a glass darkly. (Horrid Image,
Sorry Sight, Fatal Vision: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth, Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1983),
191204, at 193). In considering the plays engagement with the discourse of witchcraft, Stephen
Greenblatt argues even more strenuously that there is something ethically problematical in sight
(Shakespeare Bewitched (1993), reprinted in Shakespeares Tragedies, ed. Susan Zimmermann
(1998), p. 136). The weird sisters are certainly at the heart of the plays fog, and Shakespeare is
there with them, so Greenblatt wittily concludes, in the position of the witch (p. 130).
39
In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999), Bloom declares Bergers Imaginary Audition to be a wise book (p. 720).

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dreadfully sees to it that we are Macbeth; our identity with him is involuntary but inescapable. . . . As for all the secondary males, they are
wrapped, Bloom says, in a common grayness.40 Or a fog, one might say.
But not all the other selves we encounter in Shakespeare are as huge as
Macbeth or Hamlet or Falstaff. Some thrust themselves between us and
them, the great figures with whom as readers we two alone can sing like
birds i th cage, I-and-Thou and the world well lost.41 Bloom is not alone
in seeking to disparage the common grayness of all the others in
Macbeth, the forgettables. But grey is exactly the colour of fog, between
the certitudes of black and white, a greyness which both shrouds and silvers. If the secondary characters of Macbeth seem grey, it is because they
belong to the space that Primo Levi has unforgettably described from his
experience of Auschwitz as The Grey Zone, the space which separates
(and not only in Nazi Lagers), the victims from the persecutors, . . . Only
a schematic rhetoric can claim that that space is empty: it never is; . . ..42
We do not go to tragedy for fantasies of immunity. Macbeth reminds
us that there is no safe place for the third person, not even for the reader,
and no pinnacle of surveillance outside the making of history, not even
for an absolute monarch. There is no coign of vantage outside the performances in which we participate, immediately or from a distance. We
should therefore attend to the predicament of those onlookers, witnesses
and bystanders whose choices and fates prefigure our own, as we endlessly turn from him and her to thee and you and me and us, playing our
parts and taking them, making and unmaking our one common world.
Note. For the opportunity to deliver earlier versions of this paper I am grateful
to invitations from Barbara Everett and Emrys Jones at the University of Oxford,
Hester Jones at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Holland at the University of
Birmingham Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. I thank them, their colleagues and
students for various helpful comments and suggestions, and for specific advice,
Christopher Ricks and Matthew Reynolds.

40

Shakespeare, p. 517.
Even Shakespeares great figures will lose their particularity once they are cut off from the
density of the world they inhabit with others. John Carey has rightly complained that by the time
Bloom finishes with Shylock, Mercutio, Touchstone, King Lear and the others, these figures are
no longer Shakespeares. They have been generalised out of existence. (All in the Mind, Sunday
Times, 28 February 1999).
42
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, tr. Raymond Rosenthal (1988), p. 25.
41

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