‘They think me Macbeth, ambition is my folly’: Considering fatal flaws in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton
In a response to COVID-19, Lin-Manuel Miranda brought forward plans to release a film version of his 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton. Rather than a cinema release, he opted to stream the recording via Disney+, with an Independence Day weekend release this year. The original theatre production rode a wave of political hope — Barack Obama in the White House offered a glimpse of Alexander Hamilton’s utopian America based on ‘the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of the Country’; an America founded, in part, by an immigrant.
The connection was not lost on Obama. When he watched the show in 2015, he observed:
The idea of America that was represented here was more than just numbers, more than just statistics. It’s about who were are, who’s seen, who’s recognized, whose histories are affirmed.²
The first audiences to Hamilton left the theatre having seen a black first president, Chris Jackson as George Washington, to return to an America that had its first black president in office. Hamilton was born out of the Obama administration and captured its hope.
However, with Donald Trump in power, the political landscape for the Disney+ release was diametrically opposed. The murder of George Floyd sparked global protests as the Black Lives Matter movement saw millions of people march for equality. Whilst Hamilton looks to the founding fathers to find answers, the Black Lives Matter movement looks back at them to find fault. Within this context, Miranda’s feel good hip-hop musical came under scrutiny — did it do enough to confront the failings of the great men it presented?
Parallels between Lin-Manuel Miranda and Shakespeare are commonplace. Gary Taylor and Terri Bourus are unequivocal in their assertion that Miranda’s Hamilton has his origins in Shakespeare, claiming ‘indisputably’ that ‘Hamilton belongs to the history of Shakespeare’s continuing influence’.³ In my previous article on Miranda’s Hamilton, I considered Miranda’s use of linguistic codes to isolate Aaron Burr, the musical’s primary antagonist, and place him in the Hamlet-like role of a character ultimately destroyed by his own inaction. In this follow-up article, I will examine the explicit and implicit parallels drawn between the ambitious and ‘scrappy’ protagonist, Alexander Hamilton, and Macbeth.
The comparison of Hamilton to Macbeth is explicit and intentional. ‘They think me Macbeth, ambition is my folly’ notes Hamilton; ‘screw your courage to the sticking place’ answers Angelica in response (‘Take a Break’). Certainly Hamilton displays Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’ (Macbeth, 1.7.27) from the outset — a key character trait being his inability to wait, to take his time, to act with caution and control. ‘You never learned to take your time’ observes the title track ‘Alexander Hamilton’, ‘why do you write like you’re running out of time?’, ask the lyrics of ‘Non Stop’. Much like Macbeth was unable to wait for the weird sisters’ prophecy to come true, Hamilton too exhibits a lack of restraint. Forging ahead and forcing results, just like Macbeth he appears poised to succeed:
Hamilton doesn’t hesitate
He exhibits no restraint
He takes and he takes and he takes
And he keeps winning anyway
He changes the game
He plays and he raises the stakes. (‘Wait for It’)
Burr, the musical’s antagonist and Hamilton’s ‘Temperamental opposite’,⁴ contrasts his own predisposition to inaction to Hamilton’s relentlessness. Whereas Burr is ‘lying in wait’, Hamilton has ‘something to prove / he has nothing to lose’ (‘Wait for It’). Much as Macbeth exhibits excessive pride, a sense of entitlement, it is Hamilton’s pride that Burr claims ‘will be the death of us all / beware it goeth before the fall…’ (‘Schuyler Defeated’). Importantly it is ‘the fall’ not ‘a fall’ — pride and ambition will be the ‘step on which […he] must fall down’ and will not ‘o’erleap’ (Macbeth, 1.5.49).
What does it say about the state of the new nation when its founder, Hamilton’s protagonist, is aligned both with it — ‘I’m just like my country, I’m young scrappy and hungry’ (‘My Shot’) — and Macbeth? Are the questionable ambitions of Macbeth applicable equally to both Hamilton and America?
Certainly, it was Miranda’s intent to reach out over time boundaries. ‘This is a story about America then, told by America now’, Miranda explains, ‘and we want to eliminate any distance between a contemporary audience and this story’.⁵ Similarly, James Shapiro notes that, much as Shakespeare examined his contemporary political issues through the history plays, Miranda looks for ‘how we became who we are, and what are the stories we now tell about ourselves, about race, about our political institutions, about how they came to be’.⁶ Aligning Hamilton with Shakespeare’s desire to write England’s origin story through Richard II and Henry V, Shapiro further argues that ‘Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture’.⁷ Shakespeare looked back to Holinshed‘s Chronicles for answers; Miranda looked to the American Revolution.
Is there a sense of inevitability embedded within Hamilton— that the hot-headed, impatient, ambitious Hamilton is merely a product of the intrinsic nature of America? It could be argued that if he wasn’t our tragic hero with a fatal flaw, it would be someone else. Certainly, that is a potential reading of Macbeth. The 2020 Playing Shakespeare Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre sought to question the nature of tyranny, with director Cressida Brown wanting to leave audiences with the sense of a societal fatal flaw: ‘the idea that tyranny is something that continues, it is not tied to a leader and you never know what regime you are going to be replacing with another’.⁸ Brown’s Macbeth was as much a victim of a flawed society as he was the agent of his own undoing. A directorial choice to repeat ‘When shall we three meet again[?]’, the first line of the play, at the end of the production strengthened her reading — a choice also made by Polly Findlay in her 2018 production of the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Miranda too plays on this sense of inevitability; indeed, Hamilton’s fate is unavoidable. His well-documented real-life duel with Burr, and his demise as a historically fictionalised character, are equally foreshadowed in the musical’s opening song which acts as a prologue, with Burr admitting: ‘I’m the damned fool that shot him’ (‘Alexander Hamilton’).
As I noted in my previous article, Burr is characterised by Hamletian inaction which ultimately leads to his downfall. However, there is reason to pause. As Hamilton’s star falls, Burr seeks to capitalise and does so by taking on aspects of Hamilton’s persona. In ‘The Election of 1800’, Burr openly campaigns:
Hamilton: You’re openly campaigning?
Burr: Sure!
Hamilton: That’s new […] Is there anything you wouldn’t do?
Burr: No. I’m chasing what I want. And you know what?
Hamilton: What?
Burr: I learnt that from you.
Macbethian ambition becomes an intrinsic part of the political landscape. Burr becomes less Hamilton’s opposite and more the flipside of the same coin. Jeremy McCarter summarises this dichotomy well: ‘High-octane strivers don’t operate in a vacuum: There are all those other high-octane strivers around. Until the country has enough brass rings for everybody to grab (and maybe even then), being Alexander Hamilton, the all-American overachiever, also means being Aaron Burr: restless, watchful, unsatisfied’.⁹ Both Burr and Hamilton are less a product of their own intrinsic failings but more a product of something more universal. Perhaps Macbeth’s ambition is not Hamilton’s tragic flaw, but America’s. An America that, for Miranda, spoke the language of hip-hop, the voice of defiance and protest — of never being satisfied.
I will let Miranda have the final word:
At the end of the day, our job as artists is to tell the truth as we see it. If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it. Times may change and politics may change, but if we do our best to tell the truth as specifically as possible, time will reveal those truths and reverberate beyond the era in which we created them. We keep revisiting Shakespeare’s Macbeth because ruthless political ambition does not belong to any particular era.¹⁰
[1] Jeremy McCarter and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton, The Revolution. Little, Brown, 2016, p.284.
[2] Cited in: Jeremy McCarter and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton, The Revolution. Little, Brown, 2016, p.284.
[3] Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (eds) New Oxford Shakespeare, William Shakespeare The Complete Works, Oxford University Press, 2016, pg 29.
[4] Jeremy McCarter and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton, The Revolution. Little, Brown, 2016, p.24.
[5] Cited in: Edward Delman, How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ shapes History, 29 September 2015 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton/408019/
[6] James Shapiro, cited in: Melissa Major, ““Yay, Hamlet!”: Shakespeare’s Influence On Lin-Manuel Miranda | Great Performances | PBS”, Great Performances, 2020 <https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/lin-manuel-miranda-bard-era/5437/>
[7] Cited in: Helen Lewis, Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America, 4 December 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/12/hamilton-how-lin-manuel-miranda-s-musical-rewrote-story-america
[8] Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, A dystopian, post-apocalyptic world: Staging Macbeth in 2020, 28 February 2020, https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2020/02/28/a-dystopian-post-apocalyptic-world-staging-macbeth-in-2020/
[9] Jeremy McCarter and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton, The Revolution. Little, Brown, 2016, p.265.
[10] Lin-Manuel Miranda, The Role of the Artist in the Age of Trump, And the power of stories that are unshakably true, December 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/lin-manuel-miranda-what-art-can-do/600787/
