Macbeth is an appropriate play with which to conclude an exploration of service and dependency in Shakespeare. Almost every scene contains suggestions of servitude and bondage. Almost all the characters are preoccupied with security. The hero, who has been a warrior-guardian like Coriolanus or Othello, behaves much as do Edgar's parasitic fiends and engages desperate supporters who are lethal extensions of his own will to violence. With the help of the weird sisters, a ghost, and various “cruel ministers,” he drains labor and agency of value. His play evokes absence and emptiness, whether we stress analogies between Scotland and the traditional deprivations of Hell or concentrate on the political and social dimensions of tyranny. Macbeth himself convinces many spectators and readers that he is hopelessly bound either by a commitment to serve the devil or by his own disposition. Barbara Everett, for example, writes that “however free we call his choice to destroy himself and others, he can never get out of it.” “It is a play of extreme economy; everything is there, and there is no way out.”

Side by side with Everett's testimony to the terrifying effect of Macbeth, I would like to set an observation made by William Arrowsmith. In his “Introduction to Hecuba,” he comments that “just because necessity is hard and because the justification it gives – in politics, in love, in war – is unanswerable, it is the justification most frequently debased.”