164 Ideals in the Modern World
will matter. Macbeth suff ers the horrid disillusionment of seeing
that what ever aspirations he may have had to kingship and glory,
nothing in this world really counts. It is all empty, all void.
By the end, the major thrust of the play is clear— even Macbeth
may understand it. What looks like daring on Macbeth’s part is
merely a form of compensation. What appears to be courage is no
more than the disguising of an inadequacy. It is compensation that
takes Macbeth into crime. But the suggestion remains that it is com-
pensating for sexual inadequacy that makes him valorous to begin
with. He is, we are led to think, “Bellona’s bridegroom” (I.ii.54),
the husband of the goddess of war. And this may be because he
cannot be the proper bridegroom of any living— which is to say
desiring— woman. (Bellona was a virgin goddess, a fact Shakespeare
makes clear he knows in I Henry IV [IV.i.114].) However long he
has been married to Lady Macbeth, he has produced no heirs, no
children. There was, evidently, another man who could. It is not
her prob lem. Instead of producing children, Macbeth has produced
victories. Instead of being sexually potent, he has been what the
old aristocratic culture would have called brave.
Shakespeare, an admirer of women but no feminist himself, has
off ered terms that, in the centuries to come, will be applied by fem-
inists to the oppressor, the hypermasculine man of prowess. He is
brave because he is frightened. He is manly because he is weak.
His martial potency is a sign of a more intimate impotence. Mac-
beth is not a representative fi gure in the way Othello is. He is too
irrational, too emotional, too bloodthirsty. His imagination ig-
nites too readily—it is too much his own. But the play allows one to
ask, in a fashion that Freud among others will go on to do, whether
or not this aristocratic aspiration, this ideal called courage, may
actually be a pathology. How often is courage a quality we need to
diagnose rather than praise? How often does the aspiring hero re-
quire treatment rather than an education at arms? If the hero is a sick