Lennox
Lennox is the play's most acute political observer among the secondary characters. He moves from attendant to critic to defector, tracking the arc of Macbeth's tyranny from the inside. His ironic speech in Act III is one of Shakespeare's finest pieces of oblique political commentary.
Appears In
Biography
Lennox is a Scottish nobleman who appears throughout the play as an attendant to the court — present at Duncan's murder, at Macbeth's banquet, and at the cauldron scene. For much of the play he is a witness rather than an actor: observant, careful, and slow to commit.
His most revealing scene is Act III Scene 6, where he speaks to an unnamed lord in a passage of sustained irony — cataloguing Macbeth's crimes in language that seems, on the surface, to defend him, while making clear to any attentive listener that he has seen through everything. It is one of the play's most sophisticated pieces of political speech: a man in a dangerous court saying everything and nothing simultaneously.
By Act V he has joined the forces moving against Macbeth. His defection is less dramatic than Macduff's but in some ways more telling — he is the insider, the courtier, the man who attended every banquet, and even he has had enough.
Motivation
Lennox is motivated by self-preservation in the early acts and by an accumulating moral revulsion that eventually overcomes his caution. His loyalty is not to Macbeth but to legitimate order, and when those two things finally separate completely, his course is set.
Personality
Lennox is a survivor — he knows how to read a room and how to speak in one. His irony in Act III is not a pose but a necessity: the only safe way to say true things in a court where the king murders his guests. His eventual defection suggests that the irony was always a holding position, not a permanent one.