‘The Grace of Grace’ and Double-Talk in Macbeth

Summary

Macbeth ends with a grisly flourish of the old king’s severed head and the new king’s invitation ‘to see us crowned at Scone’ (5.11.41). In its harshly literal juxtaposition of these two heads of state, the play’s climax presents a truncated tableau of the king’s two bodies. According to that ancient doctrine, the monarchy embodies the state and attains a kind of corporate immortality. Macbeth’s final scene thus vividly dramatizes the traditional proclamation, ‘The king is dead, long live the king’. In this paradoxical formula, continuity is assured from one reign to the next, even amidst the most brutal succession struggles. Still more reassuring is Malcolm’s promise to govern ‘by the grace of grace’ (5.10.38), a prayerful allusion to monarchy’s divine right and authority. Macbeth has been described as the consummate ‘royal play’ whose performance at court was intended to celebrate the reign of James I. Yet Shakespeare’s attitude towards monarchy here and elsewhere is ambiguous. Such ambiguity is typical of a playwright who, in Hamlet, places the claim that ‘There’s such divinity that doeth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would’ (4.5.122–3) in the mouth of Claudius, a regicide and usurper. Macbeth presents even loftier visions of sacred kingship along with some of the ghastliest images of its violation. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth himself declares ‘Renown and grace is dead’ (2.3.93). By contrast, grace abounds at the English court of the sainted Edward the Confessor. There, Duncan’s eldest son, Malcolm, finds refuge and support since ‘sundry blessings hang about his throne / That speak him full of grace’ (4.3.159–60).