In A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy – a must read for all who have read the four great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth – he discusses the following passage in which Macduff reacts to the news that Macbeth has slain his wife and children:
Malcom. Be comforted: Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge, to cure this deadly grief.
Macduff. He has no children. All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?
Malcom. Dispute it like a man.
Macduff. I shall do so; But I must also feel it as a man: I cannot but remember such things were, that were most precious to me. —
Who is Macduff speaking of when he says “He has no children?” Bradley offers and analyzes the three possible interpretations:
(a) They refer to Malcolm, who, if he had children of his own, would not at such a moment suggest revenge, or talk of curing such a grief. Cf. King John, III. iv. 91, where Pandulph says to Constance,
“You hold too heinous a respect of grief,”
and Constance answers,
“He talks to me that never had a son”
(b) They refer to Macbeth, who has no children, and on whom therefore Macduff cannot take an adequate revenge.
(c) They refer to Macbeth, who, if he himself had children, could never have ordered the slaughter of children. Cf. 3 Henry VI. V. v. 63, where Margaret says to the murderers of Prince Edward,
“You have no children, butchers! if you had, The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.”
Bradley makes short shrift of choice (b) simply by pointing out that everything in the text indicates that Macduff is not the kind of man who would kill someone’s children for revenge:
Macduff is not the man to conceive at any time the idea of killing children in retaliation; and that he contemplates it here, even as a suggestion, I find it hard to believe.
I would add that Macduff is a noble personage in Macbeth. Shakespeare makes him noble to put Macbeth’s ignobility in high relief. Having Macduff express a desire to kill Macbeth’s children would have been inconsistent with Macduff’s role in the play.
The first time I read Macbeth I was certain that Macduff’s words “He has no children” meant that Macbeth was capable of killing Macduff’s children only because he himself had no children. In other words, for Macduff, only a man who had not experienced parental love could murder a child. Now, after re-reading Bradley’s notes on Macbeth, I am not so sure.
The principal objection to choice a) is syntactical. If Macduff is speaking to Malcom, the argument goes, why would he refer to him as “he” rather than “you.” In other words, choice a) can’t be correct, because if it were, Shakespeare would have had Macduff say “You have no children” not “He has no children.” Bradley, the closest of close readers, notes that there are several other instances where Shakespeare has a character refer to the person he is speaking to in the third person:
It has been objected to interpretation (a) that, according to it, Macduff would naturally say ‘You have no children,’ not ‘He has no children.’ But what Macduff does is precisely what Constance does in the line quoted [above] from King John.
Bradley also posits that in this exchange Macbeth is addressing the messenger, Ross, not Malcom, who joins the conversation only at the end via interruption,
[A]ll through the passage down to this point, and indeed in the fifteen lines which precede our quotation, Macduff listens only to Ross. His questions ‘My children too?’ ‘My wife killed too?’ show that he cannot fully realize what he is told. When Malcolm interrupts, therefore, he puts aside his suggestion with four words spoken to himself, or (less probably) to Ross (his relative, who knew his wife and children), and continues his agonized questions and exclamations. Surely it is not likely that at that moment the idea of (c), an idea which there is nothing to suggest, would occur to him.
Based on Bradley’s exegesis, I now tend to favor choice a) . . . but only on those days that I do not favor choice c).
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