160 Ideals in the Modern World
sense—he knows only one meaning for things, their right and
natu ral meaning.
Part of the play’s genius lies in the way it traces Macbeth’s affl ic-
tion with the disease of sexual anxiety. Himself infected by Lady
Macbeth, he infects others. He passes the malady on. When he is
suborning men to murder Banquo, he begins by telling them all that
Banquo has done to them and asks, implicitly, if they will bear it.
“We are men, my liege” (III.i.90), one says, and by saying so shows
signs that he may be possessed by a version of Macbeth’s erotic anx-
iety. (Perhaps all men are, the play ultimately suggests—or at least
all men with a capacity for vio lence.) Macbeth sees the possibilities
and answers: “Ay, in the cata logue ye go for men, / As hounds and
greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, / Shoughs, water- rugs, and
demi- wolves are clipt / All by the name of dogs” (III.i.91–94). You’re
biologically men, certainly, but manhood is more than simply a state
of being. It is a capacity for doing.
Macbeth pre sents himself to the murderers as someone who
knows what manhood is and who can confer its status on others.
He plays the role for the murderers that Lady Macbeth plays for
him. (In fact, Macbeth is still pining to be anointed as a true man
himself.) Dealing with the murderers, he sees what a power ful
magic manhood anxiety is. “Now, if you have a station in the fi le, /
Not i’ th’ worst rank of manhood, say’t” (III.i.101–102), he com-
mands the potential killers. Having suborned the murderers,
Macbeth can answer his wife when she asks, “Are you not a man?”
“Ay and a bold one, that dare look on that which might appall
the devil” (III.iv.58–59). He has achieved the temporary relief
that passing one’s malaise on to others can supply. For if he can
be an arbiter of manhood, then surely Macbeth must be a man
himself.
“What man dare, I dare,” Macbeth says as Banquo’s ghost ap-
proaches; if he runs afraid, he says, “protest me the baby of a girl”