Macol takes the throne and proclaims tyranny

Macol takes the throne and proclaims tyranny is a succession scene whose public pageantry turns almost immediately into a confession of future oppression. As Macbett's body is carried away and a throne is brought on, acclamation, placards, bells, and the bishop lend Macol's accession the forms of popular and sacred legitimacy. Yet the new ruler's own announcement overturns that appearance: he promises more vices and suffering, threatens the crowd with soldiers and dogs, and is ultimately left alone as discontent spreads. The ceremony replaces one tyrant with another without promising a change in the conditions of rule.

The throne and the ceremony

Macol's accession begins with a blunt command: “And bring me a throne.” The instruction is carried out in the same stage moment that two guests take up Macbett's body. A guest invites Macol to be seated, while other guests arrive and some raise placards reading “Macol is always right.” The juxtaposition makes succession visible as a transfer of position and political signs: the dead ruler is removed as the seat of authority is installed for the next one.

The ceremony acquires further public and religious forms. The crowd calls for Banco's dynasty and the king, bells sound, and the bishop enters. Macol asks whether the bishop has come to crown him. When he stands in front of the throne and demands silence, the audience is told that the king is going to speak. His accession is thus presented through a sequence of recognizable gestures—seating, acclaim, proclamation, and anticipated crowning—rather than through any account of how the country might be governed differently. The placards' absolute claim that Macol is always right anticipates the ruler's demand for obedience.

A liberation speech turned inside out

Macol initially frames his rule as deliverance. He describes the country as having sunk beneath a yoke, with a fresh gash added to its wounds each day, and claims to have trodden upon the tyrant's head. A man then appears carrying Macbett's head on a pike, giving Macol's boast a grisly stage image. The crowd's earlier acclamations and the spectacle of the defeated tyrant seem to confirm a victorious transfer of power.

But the language of liberation does not lead to a promise of repair. Macol announces, “My poor country shall have more vices than it had before, more suffer and more sundry ways than ever by me that do succeed.” The declaration is an explicit reversal of the hopeful meaning attached to overthrowing a tyrant: the successor presents worse abuses as his own intention, not as an accidental danger. The crowd responds with murmurs of discontent, amazement, and despair. The scene therefore shifts from collective celebration to alarm within the very speech meant to establish the new sovereign's authority.

Coercion and the collapse of consent

The crowd's reaction makes the limits of its earlier welcome apparent. People who had cheered Macol now voice anger toward Macbett; one hopes that the dead ruler will be roasted or impaled, and a woman threatens to put out his eyes with knitting needles. Macol answers not by calming or persuading them but by warning, “If you don't shut up at once, I'll set my soldiers and dogs on you.” The threat reveals the force behind the ceremony's demand for silence. Acclamation can be staged as consent, but the new ruler is prepared to compel obedience when the public speaks in its own voice.

A forest of guillotines then appears upstage, as it did in the First Scene. Its return places the accession within a recurring image of state violence rather than a clean break with the past. The new ruler's claim to have ended the country's wounds is set against a stage picture associated with execution; the instruments of coercion remain present as Macol takes power. After his announcement the crowd's dismay continues, and Macol is left alone. The scene makes the gap between public legitimating spectacle and actual consent visible in the action itself.

The new ruler's final image

The ceremony's political and religious witnesses do not secure a stable, shared ending. The bishop, the only person left, goes out dejectedly. Macol continues in elevated verse, declaring, “Now I have power, I shall / Pour the sweet milk of concord into Hell,” before the speech proceeds toward a string of imperial titles. The movement from a promise of discord to grand claims of rank enlarges the distance between the ruler's self-presentation and the country's condition: authority expands in language even as the scene has shown public distress and the threat of force.

Macol disappears in the mist, and when it clears the butterfly hunter crosses the stage. The ruler's exit leaves no image of a settled political community or a reconciled crowd; the final change of scene places his sovereignty in an evanescent theatrical tableau. The accession thus completes the immediate transfer of the throne while refusing the expectation that a victorious successor must bring relief. Macbett is gone, but the signs of absolute rule, public submission, and impending violence have returned under Macol.