Discussions of Yellow Doggery in Elizabethan Fiction
(I had other posts on other things, from fresh hypocrisy from pseudo-prolifers to l'affaire Watergate to the chemical plant blowup in China, but my wretched miserable arthritic camel of a computer has been locking up repeatedly, so those will have to wait. I'm passing up the "opportunity" to see Michael Flatley in the flesh (and leather pants) for free - but it's cold, and dark, and I don't really want to go out in the snow with a bunch of semi-drunk Mancastrians to stand in the street in front of a pub, particularly, not even for the amusement value, so I'm posting instead.)
This was inspired by an ongoing symposium that matociquala has been holding on transgressive writing and behavior of the gender/politics/religion sort (and yes those are all slashed together on purpose) by Elizabethan poets, centering on the figure of Kit Marlowe and his contemporaries Shakespeare & Jonson. Since that too was "an age very like the present" particularly with the business of secret police, the merging of politics and religion, censorship and treason so much in the news, fear of foreign agents and suborned saboteurs well before the Gunpowder Plot was hatched (by people who were alive in those days too), it none of it seems irrelevant. And in the course of it, an old significance was brought again to mind in my mind, the little scene in Macbeth that nobody ever seems to talk about or think of much importance, except me. To wit, act 4, sc. iii.
I've always thought it important. It's stuck with me since the moment I saw it, nigh twenty years ago, in the iffy BBC production that was broadcast on PBS as part of a series of all the Shakespeare plays, some of which were masterfully directed and others terribly and some others, so-so or uneven. (Of the ones I saw and remember clearly, Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado about Nothing were all superior, Richard III was well done, Othello iffy, and Macbeth mostly awful.) The scene is partly gripping because if you've been following the plot, you realize that Doom is coming for MacDuff and you can't do anything about it, but also because of the matter of it. It's something that seemed terribly important to me at the time, and has never gotten any less so: how far can you compromise, when it comes to the ethical standards and behavior and hypocrisy of your chosen leader? When is legitimacy forfiet, by lack of good leadership, even when the paper credentials are there? And what do you do in that case?
But read for yourself:
SCENE III. England. Before the King's palace.
Enter MALCOLM and MACDUFF
MALCOLM
Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.
MACDUFF
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.
MALCOLM
What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.
What you have spoke, it may be so perchance.
This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest: you have loved him well.
He hath not touch'd you yet. I am young; but something
You may deserve of him through me, and wisdom
To offer up a weak poor innocent lamb
To appease an angry god.
MACDUFF
I am not treacherous.
MALCOLM
But Macbeth is.
A good and virtuous nature may recoil
In an imperial charge. But I shall crave your pardon;
That which you are my thoughts cannot transpose:
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell;
Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.
MACDUFF
I have lost my hopes.
MALCOLM
Perchance even there where I did find my doubts.
Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
Without leave-taking? I pray you,
Let not my jealousies be your dishonours,
But mine own safeties. You may be rightly just,
Whatever I shall think.
MACDUFF
Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny! lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not cheque thee: wear thou thy wrongs;
The title is affeer'd! Fare thee well, lord:
I would not be the villain that thou think'st
For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp,
And the rich East to boot.
MALCOLM
Be not offended:
I speak not as in absolute fear of you.
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds: I think withal
There would be hands uplifted in my right;
And here from gracious England have I offer
Of goodly thousands: but, for all this,
When I shall tread upon the tyrant's head,
Or wear it on my sword, yet my poor country
Shall have more vices than it had before,
More suffer and more sundry ways than ever,
By him that shall succeed.
MACDUFF
What should he be?
MALCOLM
It is myself I mean: in whom I know
All the particulars of vice so grafted
That, when they shall be open'd, black Macbeth
Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state
Esteem him as a lamb, being compared
With my confineless harms.
MACDUFF
Not in the legions
Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd
In evils to top Macbeth.
MALCOLM
I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
That did oppose my will: better Macbeth
Than such an one to reign.
MACDUFF
Boundless intemperance
In nature is a tyranny; it hath been
The untimely emptying of the happy throne
And fall of many kings. But fear not yet
To take upon you what is yours: you may
Convey your pleasures in a spacious plenty,
And yet seem cold, the time you may so hoodwink.
We have willing dames enough: there cannot be
That vulture in you, to devour so many
As will to greatness dedicate themselves,
Finding it so inclined.
MALCOLM
With this there grows
In my most ill-composed affection such
A stanchless avarice that, were I king,
I should cut off the nobles for their lands,
Desire his jewels and this other's house:
And my more-having would be as a sauce
To make me hunger more; that I should forge
Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
Destroying them for wealth.
MACDUFF
This avarice
Sticks deeper, grows with more pernicious root
Than summer-seeming lust, and it hath been
The sword of our slain kings: yet do not fear;
Scotland hath foisons to fill up your will.
Of your mere own: all these are portable,
With other graces weigh'd.
MALCOLM
But I have none: the king-becoming graces,
As justice, verity, temperance, stableness,
Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,
Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude,
I have no relish of them, but abound
In the division of each several crime,
Acting it many ways. Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth.
MACDUFF
O Scotland, Scotland!
MALCOLM
If such a one be fit to govern, speak:
I am as I have spoken.
MACDUFF
Fit to govern!
No, not to live. O nation miserable,
With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd,
When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again,
Since that the truest issue of thy throne
By his own interdiction stands accursed,
And does blaspheme his breed? Thy royal father
Was a most sainted king: the queen that bore thee,
Oftener upon her knees than on her feet,
Died every day she lived. Fare thee well!
These evils thou repeat'st upon thyself
Have banish'd me from Scotland. O my breast,
Thy hope ends here!
MALCOLM
Macduff, this noble passion,
Child of integrity, hath from my soul
Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts
To thy good truth and honour. Devilish Macbeth
By many of these trains hath sought to win me
Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me
From over-credulous haste: but God above
Deal between thee and me! for even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature. I am yet
Unknown to woman, never was forsworn,
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own,
At no time broke my faith, would not betray
The devil to his fellow and delight
No less in truth than life: my first false speaking
Was this upon myself: what I am truly,
Is thine and my poor country's to command:
Whither indeed, before thy here-approach,
Old Siward, with ten thousand warlike men,
Already at a point, was setting forth.
Now we'll together; and the chance of goodness
Be like our warranted quarrel! Why are you silent?
MACDUFF
Such welcome and unwelcome things at once
'Tis hard to reconcile.
We have here a very curious situation. Macduff is the loyal, unquestioning patriot here, in exile with his lawful lord, the son of the assassinated leader he swore his alleigance to, trying to get help to retake the government from former enemies - a position all too familiar to modern exiled aristocracy from the Stewarts to the Romanovs to the Pahlavis to the House of Al-Sabah [Kuwait]. Shakespeare is both reflecting past events and prophesying the future - or rather, showing forth a chronic pattern of politics predating the house of Herod Antipater. This question - is it right to get help from the English to re-invade Scotland because we're the Good Guys - isn't directly confronted in the play. However it is obliquely, in this scenelet which is extremely subversive particularly if you consider the backdrop of Elizabethan-Jacobian intrigues. It isn't even transfered to some far-off fantasy country of Illyria or mythic Greece, it's just historical fiction.
Most people discussing The Scottish Play focus on the character of Macbeth himself, or Lady Macbeth, or What Shakespeare Was Trying To Say With The Witches, and imo usually miss on all counts. Macbeth was not a good man before the Witches got at him, and "the Devil made him do it" - he was an unthinking, and thus an untempted man, who gave in as soon as a plausible model of success was shown to him. Lady Macbeth's being the more ruthless at first, and then getting completely wigged out by his outpacing her with callous violence, classic paranoid dictator mode, is not entirely OOC. And the Witches, like the Faerie Court in Midsummer Night's Dream, are both the Ex Machina of the plot, and enjoyed in their own right as dramatic/poetic entities. It's that simple.
The really interesting stuff comes with the only half-answered questions about Duty and, well, man'chi, and what's going to come next after the curtain closes - far more than in Hamlet where you don't really have a feeling of the people being real, of the story really pre-existing and continuing offstage, but the soap-opera feel of it being all stagey. Macbeth - even when oafishly put on, as it has in both instances I've seen it, once live, and the BBC version - has a "documentary" feel to it, although it's entirely historical fiction just as much as any Holy Wood production, in part because of the ambiguities and the lack of any neat ending. People are still dead, they've still just had a civil war, how can anyone trust anyone else? Given that it was produced the year after the Gunpowder Plot, for the (half-French) Scottish king of England James (of the King James Bible fame) it hardly seems a reassuring piece of public art for a time of national insecurity.
And in this most trenchant scene, you get a very strange situation. Going back, you've got the unquestioningly loyal MacDuff, who has left his wife and young son back home in Scotland [cue ominous music] while he goes along to protect the murdered kings' teenage sons, who are the legitimate heirs to the throne. It should belong to the elder, Malcom, right? That's the beginning and end of the question for Macduff: Macbeth's a traitor and a regicide, Prince Malcom's the rightful heir, they should a) kill Macbeth and b) crown Malcom, ASAP, end of story. Because Macbeth is himself an increasingly psychotic and paranoid dictator, this would seem to simplify things even more, to the point of no questions being asked.
So Malcom, wise beyond his years, has to play devil's advocate against himself, and ask the questions that any political supporter should be asking of him or herself, in advance: what makes someone fit to be leader? Is it merely a "just cause" or a "legal claim" - or is more required? What about when you have Evildum and Evildee, rather than the Bad Guys vs the Good Guys? Can you just assume that Good Guys is commensurate with Us--?
Malcom forces Macduff to think about why he supports him. This is never explained, the motivation for this scene, not explicitly - but I think that you can see pretty easily why having seen what his father's unthinkingly-loyal partisan Macbeth was capable of, the son of Duncan might want a bit more recollected and self-examined loyalty from his own followers in the future.
So he starts out by putting himself in a confessional role, telling Macduff that he's worse than Macbeth could ever be. Nah, that's impossible says Macduff, but the prince goes on: I'm a total player, a complete lech, with no sexual self control, make me king and I'll screw anything in a skirt.
Eh, ew, TMI! is the faithfully-married Macduff's response, [cue ominous music] but oh, well - that's not that bad, yes, sinful, squicky, but you know, in the scope of things, compared to being a paranoid dictator with death squads, not so bad. There are lots of Bright Young Things ready willing and able to throw themselves at a head of state (see, Shakespeare even Saw Monica Lewinski) and we can deal with that, if that's the worst we have to worry about from our leader.
Nuh-uh, says Malcom, you give me Commander-in-Chief power, I'm going to use it to screw the country in other ways, too. I'm greedier than you can believe, and I won't be able to stop myself if you let me at the public purse. I'll ruin loyal employees just to enrich myself. You're better off with Macbeth, don't you think?
Macduff is now worried, where he wasn't about the Prince's insatiable sex drive - but hey, nobody can be as bad as Deathsquads Macbeth, and even though this is bad, still we can cope with this, we can make sure you turn a profit, we're rich enough for that, and it'll be find, because of your other good leadership qualities.
What other good leadership qualities? asks Malcom, and procedes to enumerate just how many virtues he doesn't have. In fact, he says, he's a total Loki-type, who will create nothing but anarchy and chaos, given absolute power.
Oh shit, says Macduff, we're totally screwed. There's no hope for the country now - at which point Malcom apologizes and reassures him that he was just checking to make sure that Macduff couldn't be suborned, that his moral integrity was so good that it wouldn't allow blind loyalty and indifference to faults on his "own" side, even.
Which is curious, because you'd think that if Malcom were worried about Macbeth slandering him, and trying to seduce the Scots lords to his side by claiming that Malcom was corrupt and unworthy, he'd just say, "you know, Macbeth is going around trying to get people on his side," rather than testing Macduff's loyalty past the breaking point.
But by forcing him to face his limits - and to face the possibility that his own side, his own leaders, are flawed, and what then? he ends up with a Moment of Truth for them both, in which ironically by knowing that there are limits, beyond which Macduff won't back him, the Prince can now be completely sure of and trust in Macduff, while Macduff in turn can be sure that his liege lord isn't being two-faced with him, in so far as anyone can trust another human being - that he's humble enough to play the part of bad guy in order to get his people to think and decide rationally, pushing them through wrenching catharsis, rather than just play to the easy emotions of patriotism and personal loyalty that the normal folks would rather have. --It almost makes the Clint Eastwood-like finale of the scene superfluous.
299 years ago, Shakespeare was making the point in popular drama that it isn't enough to just Remove A Brutal Dictator and expect that to be the panacea for all problems. You have to think about what you're putting in his place, too. (When will we ever learn?)
This was inspired by an ongoing symposium that matociquala has been holding on transgressive writing and behavior of the gender/politics/religion sort (and yes those are all slashed together on purpose) by Elizabethan poets, centering on the figure of Kit Marlowe and his contemporaries Shakespeare & Jonson. Since that too was "an age very like the present" particularly with the business of secret police, the merging of politics and religion, censorship and treason so much in the news, fear of foreign agents and suborned saboteurs well before the Gunpowder Plot was hatched (by people who were alive in those days too), it none of it seems irrelevant. And in the course of it, an old significance was brought again to mind in my mind, the little scene in Macbeth that nobody ever seems to talk about or think of much importance, except me. To wit, act 4, sc. iii.
I've always thought it important. It's stuck with me since the moment I saw it, nigh twenty years ago, in the iffy BBC production that was broadcast on PBS as part of a series of all the Shakespeare plays, some of which were masterfully directed and others terribly and some others, so-so or uneven. (Of the ones I saw and remember clearly, Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado about Nothing were all superior, Richard III was well done, Othello iffy, and Macbeth mostly awful.) The scene is partly gripping because if you've been following the plot, you realize that Doom is coming for MacDuff and you can't do anything about it, but also because of the matter of it. It's something that seemed terribly important to me at the time, and has never gotten any less so: how far can you compromise, when it comes to the ethical standards and behavior and hypocrisy of your chosen leader? When is legitimacy forfiet, by lack of good leadership, even when the paper credentials are there? And what do you do in that case?
But read for yourself:
SCENE III. England. Before the King's palace.
Enter MALCOLM and MACDUFF
MALCOLM
Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.
MACDUFF
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.
MALCOLM
What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.
What you have spoke, it may be so perchance.
This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest: you have loved him well.
He hath not touch'd you yet. I am young; but something
You may deserve of him through me, and wisdom
To offer up a weak poor innocent lamb
To appease an angry god.
MACDUFF
I am not treacherous.
MALCOLM
But Macbeth is.
A good and virtuous nature may recoil
In an imperial charge. But I shall crave your pardon;
That which you are my thoughts cannot transpose:
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell;
Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.
MACDUFF
I have lost my hopes.
MALCOLM
Perchance even there where I did find my doubts.
Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
Without leave-taking? I pray you,
Let not my jealousies be your dishonours,
But mine own safeties. You may be rightly just,
Whatever I shall think.
MACDUFF
Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny! lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not cheque thee: wear thou thy wrongs;
The title is affeer'd! Fare thee well, lord:
I would not be the villain that thou think'st
For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp,
And the rich East to boot.
MALCOLM
Be not offended:
I speak not as in absolute fear of you.
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds: I think withal
There would be hands uplifted in my right;
And here from gracious England have I offer
Of goodly thousands: but, for all this,
When I shall tread upon the tyrant's head,
Or wear it on my sword, yet my poor country
Shall have more vices than it had before,
More suffer and more sundry ways than ever,
By him that shall succeed.
MACDUFF
What should he be?
MALCOLM
It is myself I mean: in whom I know
All the particulars of vice so grafted
That, when they shall be open'd, black Macbeth
Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state
Esteem him as a lamb, being compared
With my confineless harms.
MACDUFF
Not in the legions
Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd
In evils to top Macbeth.
MALCOLM
I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
That did oppose my will: better Macbeth
Than such an one to reign.
MACDUFF
Boundless intemperance
In nature is a tyranny; it hath been
The untimely emptying of the happy throne
And fall of many kings. But fear not yet
To take upon you what is yours: you may
Convey your pleasures in a spacious plenty,
And yet seem cold, the time you may so hoodwink.
We have willing dames enough: there cannot be
That vulture in you, to devour so many
As will to greatness dedicate themselves,
Finding it so inclined.
MALCOLM
With this there grows
In my most ill-composed affection such
A stanchless avarice that, were I king,
I should cut off the nobles for their lands,
Desire his jewels and this other's house:
And my more-having would be as a sauce
To make me hunger more; that I should forge
Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
Destroying them for wealth.
MACDUFF
This avarice
Sticks deeper, grows with more pernicious root
Than summer-seeming lust, and it hath been
The sword of our slain kings: yet do not fear;
Scotland hath foisons to fill up your will.
Of your mere own: all these are portable,
With other graces weigh'd.
MALCOLM
But I have none: the king-becoming graces,
As justice, verity, temperance, stableness,
Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,
Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude,
I have no relish of them, but abound
In the division of each several crime,
Acting it many ways. Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth.
MACDUFF
O Scotland, Scotland!
MALCOLM
If such a one be fit to govern, speak:
I am as I have spoken.
MACDUFF
Fit to govern!
No, not to live. O nation miserable,
With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd,
When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again,
Since that the truest issue of thy throne
By his own interdiction stands accursed,
And does blaspheme his breed? Thy royal father
Was a most sainted king: the queen that bore thee,
Oftener upon her knees than on her feet,
Died every day she lived. Fare thee well!
These evils thou repeat'st upon thyself
Have banish'd me from Scotland. O my breast,
Thy hope ends here!
MALCOLM
Macduff, this noble passion,
Child of integrity, hath from my soul
Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts
To thy good truth and honour. Devilish Macbeth
By many of these trains hath sought to win me
Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me
From over-credulous haste: but God above
Deal between thee and me! for even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature. I am yet
Unknown to woman, never was forsworn,
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own,
At no time broke my faith, would not betray
The devil to his fellow and delight
No less in truth than life: my first false speaking
Was this upon myself: what I am truly,
Is thine and my poor country's to command:
Whither indeed, before thy here-approach,
Old Siward, with ten thousand warlike men,
Already at a point, was setting forth.
Now we'll together; and the chance of goodness
Be like our warranted quarrel! Why are you silent?
MACDUFF
Such welcome and unwelcome things at once
'Tis hard to reconcile.
We have here a very curious situation. Macduff is the loyal, unquestioning patriot here, in exile with his lawful lord, the son of the assassinated leader he swore his alleigance to, trying to get help to retake the government from former enemies - a position all too familiar to modern exiled aristocracy from the Stewarts to the Romanovs to the Pahlavis to the House of Al-Sabah [Kuwait]. Shakespeare is both reflecting past events and prophesying the future - or rather, showing forth a chronic pattern of politics predating the house of Herod Antipater. This question - is it right to get help from the English to re-invade Scotland because we're the Good Guys - isn't directly confronted in the play. However it is obliquely, in this scenelet which is extremely subversive particularly if you consider the backdrop of Elizabethan-Jacobian intrigues. It isn't even transfered to some far-off fantasy country of Illyria or mythic Greece, it's just historical fiction.
Most people discussing The Scottish Play focus on the character of Macbeth himself, or Lady Macbeth, or What Shakespeare Was Trying To Say With The Witches, and imo usually miss on all counts. Macbeth was not a good man before the Witches got at him, and "the Devil made him do it" - he was an unthinking, and thus an untempted man, who gave in as soon as a plausible model of success was shown to him. Lady Macbeth's being the more ruthless at first, and then getting completely wigged out by his outpacing her with callous violence, classic paranoid dictator mode, is not entirely OOC. And the Witches, like the Faerie Court in Midsummer Night's Dream, are both the Ex Machina of the plot, and enjoyed in their own right as dramatic/poetic entities. It's that simple.
The really interesting stuff comes with the only half-answered questions about Duty and, well, man'chi, and what's going to come next after the curtain closes - far more than in Hamlet where you don't really have a feeling of the people being real, of the story really pre-existing and continuing offstage, but the soap-opera feel of it being all stagey. Macbeth - even when oafishly put on, as it has in both instances I've seen it, once live, and the BBC version - has a "documentary" feel to it, although it's entirely historical fiction just as much as any Holy Wood production, in part because of the ambiguities and the lack of any neat ending. People are still dead, they've still just had a civil war, how can anyone trust anyone else? Given that it was produced the year after the Gunpowder Plot, for the (half-French) Scottish king of England James (of the King James Bible fame) it hardly seems a reassuring piece of public art for a time of national insecurity.
And in this most trenchant scene, you get a very strange situation. Going back, you've got the unquestioningly loyal MacDuff, who has left his wife and young son back home in Scotland [cue ominous music] while he goes along to protect the murdered kings' teenage sons, who are the legitimate heirs to the throne. It should belong to the elder, Malcom, right? That's the beginning and end of the question for Macduff: Macbeth's a traitor and a regicide, Prince Malcom's the rightful heir, they should a) kill Macbeth and b) crown Malcom, ASAP, end of story. Because Macbeth is himself an increasingly psychotic and paranoid dictator, this would seem to simplify things even more, to the point of no questions being asked.
So Malcom, wise beyond his years, has to play devil's advocate against himself, and ask the questions that any political supporter should be asking of him or herself, in advance: what makes someone fit to be leader? Is it merely a "just cause" or a "legal claim" - or is more required? What about when you have Evildum and Evildee, rather than the Bad Guys vs the Good Guys? Can you just assume that Good Guys is commensurate with Us--?
Malcom forces Macduff to think about why he supports him. This is never explained, the motivation for this scene, not explicitly - but I think that you can see pretty easily why having seen what his father's unthinkingly-loyal partisan Macbeth was capable of, the son of Duncan might want a bit more recollected and self-examined loyalty from his own followers in the future.
So he starts out by putting himself in a confessional role, telling Macduff that he's worse than Macbeth could ever be. Nah, that's impossible says Macduff, but the prince goes on: I'm a total player, a complete lech, with no sexual self control, make me king and I'll screw anything in a skirt.
Eh, ew, TMI! is the faithfully-married Macduff's response, [cue ominous music] but oh, well - that's not that bad, yes, sinful, squicky, but you know, in the scope of things, compared to being a paranoid dictator with death squads, not so bad. There are lots of Bright Young Things ready willing and able to throw themselves at a head of state (see, Shakespeare even Saw Monica Lewinski) and we can deal with that, if that's the worst we have to worry about from our leader.
Nuh-uh, says Malcom, you give me Commander-in-Chief power, I'm going to use it to screw the country in other ways, too. I'm greedier than you can believe, and I won't be able to stop myself if you let me at the public purse. I'll ruin loyal employees just to enrich myself. You're better off with Macbeth, don't you think?
Macduff is now worried, where he wasn't about the Prince's insatiable sex drive - but hey, nobody can be as bad as Deathsquads Macbeth, and even though this is bad, still we can cope with this, we can make sure you turn a profit, we're rich enough for that, and it'll be find, because of your other good leadership qualities.
What other good leadership qualities? asks Malcom, and procedes to enumerate just how many virtues he doesn't have. In fact, he says, he's a total Loki-type, who will create nothing but anarchy and chaos, given absolute power.
Oh shit, says Macduff, we're totally screwed. There's no hope for the country now - at which point Malcom apologizes and reassures him that he was just checking to make sure that Macduff couldn't be suborned, that his moral integrity was so good that it wouldn't allow blind loyalty and indifference to faults on his "own" side, even.
Which is curious, because you'd think that if Malcom were worried about Macbeth slandering him, and trying to seduce the Scots lords to his side by claiming that Malcom was corrupt and unworthy, he'd just say, "you know, Macbeth is going around trying to get people on his side," rather than testing Macduff's loyalty past the breaking point.
But by forcing him to face his limits - and to face the possibility that his own side, his own leaders, are flawed, and what then? he ends up with a Moment of Truth for them both, in which ironically by knowing that there are limits, beyond which Macduff won't back him, the Prince can now be completely sure of and trust in Macduff, while Macduff in turn can be sure that his liege lord isn't being two-faced with him, in so far as anyone can trust another human being - that he's humble enough to play the part of bad guy in order to get his people to think and decide rationally, pushing them through wrenching catharsis, rather than just play to the easy emotions of patriotism and personal loyalty that the normal folks would rather have. --It almost makes the Clint Eastwood-like finale of the scene superfluous.
299 years ago, Shakespeare was making the point in popular drama that it isn't enough to just Remove A Brutal Dictator and expect that to be the panacea for all problems. You have to think about what you're putting in his place, too. (When will we ever learn?)