“Black Macbett will seem as pure as snow”

“Black Macbett will seem as pure as snow” is the sharpest comparison in Macol’s declaration of future rule: the dead tyrant, already acknowledged as bloody and sinful, will look nearly pure beside the vices Macol claims to possess. The image turns apparent praise into an indictment of the successor. Macbett’s blackness is not erased; it is made to look pale by the still darker standard Macol sets for himself.

The expression in its speech

Macol places the comparison within an explicit promise of worsening conditions. He says, “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 country, not merely the succession of rulers, is the object of this forecast: Macol presents his accession as a further injury to an already suffering state. The expression gives that promise a concentrated image. Rather than claiming that Macbett was virtuous, Macol predicts that the tyrant will look virtuous when judged against the ruler who follows him.

The surrounding action makes the speech a public announcement rather than a private reflection. Just beforehand, Macol threatens to set his soldiers and dogs on those who will not be quiet, and a forest of guillotines appears upstage as in the First Scene. Within that threatening spectacle, the reference to snow does not soften the political scene. It sharpens its menace: purity becomes a standard invoked while coercive force is visibly at hand. The image belongs to a speech whose promise of future rule is already framed by threat.

How the comparison works

Macol develops the comparison through a sequence of claims about what is hidden within him. He begins, “In me I know / All the particulars of vice so grafted / That, when they shall be opened,” before arriving at the prediction about Macbett. The verb “grafted” makes vice seem rooted in Macol rather than an isolated failing, while “opened” suggests that its full extent has yet to become visible. The contrast therefore depends on time as well as degree: Macbett’s reputation is judged against what Macol says will be disclosed in his own conduct.

The image’s force rests on an imbalance between blackness and snow. Macbett is explicitly called “black,” but snow supplies the startlingly white comparison that makes him seem “pure.” The line does not reverse the earlier moral judgment of the tyrant. Macol immediately grants that Macbett was “bloody,” “Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,” and “Sudden, malicious.” Those admissions prevent the comparison from functioning as a defense of Macbett. Its logic is relative: a ruler with those named faults can nevertheless appear lamb-like beside a successor who anticipates harms without limit.

From tyrant to measure

Macol makes that relative judgment explicit in the continuation: “the poor state / Esteem him as a lamb, being compared / With my confineless harms.” The image thus shifts from how Macbett will appear to how the country will esteem him. “A lamb” extends the contrast beyond snow’s color, suggesting innocence in the public comparison, while “confineless harms” names the standard that produces it. The effect is deeply ironic: the predecessor’s brutality becomes, in retrospect, a measure of apparent gentleness, not because the brutality has changed, but because Macol announces something worse.

The expression also gives the succession a grim structure. Macol does not promise repair after the death of a tyrant. He forecasts an increase in vice and suffering, then uses the dead ruler as the lower point on a scale of harm. The language of inheritance is pointed: Macol is “me that do succeed,” and he presents the successor’s rule not as a break from the past but as an escalation that will revise how the past is remembered. The comparison therefore links political succession with retrospective judgment: Macbett’s deeds remain condemnable, yet a worse successor can make the condemned ruler appear almost innocent.

The speech’s ending and the phrase’s force

The speech does not leave the crowd in agreement. As Macol continues, the assembled people murmur with “discontent, amazement and despair”; when he finishes, he is left alone. These reactions place a public response beside his confident forecast. The comparison may state how Macol expects the country to judge Macbett in the future, but the immediate response to Macol is neither approval nor reassurance. His claim to surpass the tyrant isolates him at the close of the announcement.

The speech continues beyond the snow image, naming Macbett’s faults and insisting that “there's no bottom, none,” in the account of vice. That movement matters to the expression’s meaning: the memorable comparison is not an isolated flourish but the hinge between Macol’s forecast of concealed wickedness and his catalogue of the predecessor’s crimes. Its governing irony is that Macbett can be both bloody and, by comparison, lamb-like. The line makes political degradation legible through an image of impossible moral contrast, while leaving the audience with the prospect that the new ruler will deepen, rather than end, the country’s suffering.