I’ve spent the last week or so in the unsettling company of that most dysfunctional of married couples, the Macbeths, writing an introduction to the forthcoming Ignatius Critical Edition of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play. It’s always a joy to spend time with the Bard, even if he introduces us to demonically twisted characters whom we’d rather not meet under any other circumstances! Shakespeare’s singularly brilliant presence always edifies and educates in the most powerful way.

During the course of my background reading before embarking on the writing of the introduction to the play, I came across Chesterton’s essay, “The Macbeths”. Although the essay was not published in Chesterton’s lifetime, and though, quite frankly, it’s a little odd in its efforts to paint the Macbeths as a typical married couple – a feat that is even beyond GKC’s power of paradox – the essay did contain a brilliant insight into the consequences of Macbeth’s pride and the radical relativism that leads to despair. Here is Chesterton on the Shrinking of Macbeth:

“Make a morbid decision and you will only become more morbid; do a lawlesss thing and you will only get into an atmosphere much more suffocating than that of law. Indeed, it is a mistake to speak of a man as ‘breaking out.’ The lawless man never breaks out; he breaks in. He smashes a door and finds himself in another room, he smashes a wall and finds himself in a yet smaller one. The more he shatters the more his habitation shrinks. Where he ends you may read in the end of Macbeth.

“For us moderns, therefore, the first philosophical significance of the play is this; that our life is one thing and that our lawless acts limit us; every time we break a law we make a limitation. In some strange way hidden in the deeps of human psychology, if we build our palace on some unknown wrong it turns very slowly into our prison. Macbeth at the end of the play is not merely a wild beast; he is a caged wild beast.”