Macbeth

New Critical Essays

Nick Moschovakis, Nick Moschovakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135870881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume offers a wealth of critical analysis, supported with ample historical and bibliographical information about one of Shakespeare's most enduringly popular and globally influential plays. Its eighteen new chapters represent a broad spectrum of current scholarly and interpretive approaches, from historicist criticism to performance theory to cultural studies. A substantial section addresses early modern themes, with attention to the protagonists and the discourses of politics, class, gender, the emotions, and the economy, along with discussions of significant 'minor' characters and less commonly examined textual passages. Further chapters scrutinize Macbeth's performance, adaptation and transformation across several media—stage, film, text, and hypertext—in cultural settings ranging from early nineteenth-century England to late twentieth-century China. The editor's extensive introduction surveys critical, theatrical, and cinematic interpretations from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, while advancing a synthetic argument to explain the shifting relationship between two conflicting strains in the tragedy's reception. Written to a level that will be both accessible to advanced undergraduates and, at the same time, useful to post-graduates and specialists in the field, this book will greatly enhance any study of Macbeth.

Contributors: Rebecca Lemon, Jonathan Baldo, Rebecca Ann Bach, Julie Barmazel, Abraham Stoll, Lois Feuer, Stephen Deng, Lisa Tomaszewski, Lynne Bruckner, Michael David Fox, James Wells, Laura Engel, Stephen Buhler, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, Bruno Lessard, Pamela Mason.

1
Introduction

Dualistic Macbeth?Problematic Macbeth?

Nick Moschovakis

Shakespeare probably wrote his Tragedy of Macbeth just over four centuries ago. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, audiences and readers in the English-speaking world and Europe became well acquainted with the play. Since then, cultures around the globe have embraced it as a well-wrought drama of action and character—even as adapters and interpreters have presented radically different views of its overarching values and its larger outlook on human experience.

The play moves rapidly and suspensefully, climaxing in a battle. Its protagonists are alternately admired and abhorred; fortunate and miserable; self-assured and terrified; gratified and tormented. Its human plot speaks directly to any society where fears of treachery are felt; where blood is shed for advantage; and where crimes against unsuspecting allies, acquaintances, and friends are supposed to lead to remorse.

Macbeth joins these readily understood themes to a masque-like subplot involving conjurations, prophecies, and supernatural agency. It thus enlarges its scope beyond that of ordinary human relations. It invites speculation about the ultimate causes of pain and suffering, and may elicit our sympathy with reviled transgressors as we witness the betrayal of their extraordinary hopes.

The weïrd sisters have been variously understood by different individuals, times, and cultures. They embody humanity’s perennial failure to impose its conscious will and its ideas of order upon the unruly energies of desire, the pride of the great, and the manifold horrors of war and tyranny. Last but not least, they conspire to bring us face to face with the ultimate disappointment of death.

The present introduction: purpose and terminology

Among the many questions Macbeth raises, one of the most encompassing is that of how to make choices in life—what the basis of our actions should be. Recent criticism has been energized by profound disagreements over whether or not Macbeth upholds a dualistic view of morality: one which measures human actions and objectives by their worth relative to polar opposites of ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ When Macbeth first hears the witches’ prophecies, he sounds problematically unable to place their promises in either category: “This supernatural soliciting/ Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.129–30). His disinclination to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘ill’ recalls his fondness for paradoxes elsewhere—“So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.36), “nothing is,/ But what is not” (140–41). Yet Shakespeare often explored such occasions for ambivalence elsewhere in his writing. We might suspect that he shared the view of the nineteenth-century American sage who proclaimed, “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this” (Emerson 290).

Is Macbeth, then, meant to throw doubt on our ability to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘evil’? Or does it instead assure us, dualistically, that we can tell them apart (and that we must)? Does it, or does it not, illustrate the premise that men and women have an ability and an obligation to choose what is best—even when they fail to exercise this capacity? The very liveliness of recent controversies may attest to Macbeth’s ambivalent stance on the issue. Yet its characters often speak in ways that suggest a commitment to dualistic ideologies. Moreover, as we will see, a similar attachment to moral dualism consistently informed the work of both critics and performers from the later seventeenth century until the modern period. It was not until the twentieth century that Shakespeare’s interpreters began explicitly arguing that Macbeth was designed to confound dualistic categories, problematizing our moral perceptions and judgments—and so substantiating the weïrd sisters’ contention that “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.12).

The present chapter will trace this modern shift from the dualistic Macbeth toward its opposite, which, for brevity’s sake, I term the ‘problematic’ Macbeth. This approach, though narrowly focused, can afford many telling glimpses of representative moments in the play’s history. By following the development of earlier, dualistic Macbeths and, later, those that arose to rival them, I aim to present a continuous (if inevitably partial and abbreviated) guide to Macbeth’s evolution through time.

Part I begins with a summary of what scholars can and cannot claim to know, on the basis of textual and historical evidence, about Macbeth in its original context. By the 1660s—though not earlier—we can cite plentiful evidence for the reception of Macbeth as a morally polarized play about ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ After that, Macbeths proliferated and diversified for three centuries or so, though almost always in keeping with a basically dualistic perspective; this rich, evolving strain in Macbeth’s reception remained dominant until the 1960s. Since then, problematic Macbeths have become more culturally viable.

As I develop this narrative in Part I, my purpose is to highlight major features of critical, theatrical, and cinematic versions, while relating the most innovative to some of the cultural and social changes that informed them. Without trying to be comprehensive (an impossible aim), I have sought in Part I to illustrate both the breadth and the depth of Macbeth’s involvement with the historical and creative currents of four centuries.¹ Part I also briefly surveys a range of global Macbeths—though here, again, omissions have been inevitable (if regrettable)—and it concludes with a section contrasting two English productions from the past decade. My coverage of criticism in Part I ends with the 1960s; this is because I have chosen to address recent scholarship separately, in Part II.

Part II supplies numerous references to critical studies published from the 1980s through the early 2000s. Despite exigencies of space, I have tried to give some attention to a considerable proportion of this secondary literature, while identifying some of each critic’s main concerns. In keeping with the Introduction’s general argument, I have also arranged Part II into two sections, reflecting my rough dichotomy between dualistic and problematic views of the play. Of course I don’t mean to reify these heuristic terms into a new and unhelpfully artificial binary of my own invention. As a recent essay on Macbeth has provocatively argued, professional and pedagogical habits of thought can lead us to overemphasize the dichotomous patterns a work explores, even as we aim to show how it complicates those patterns (Crane). The most effective critical readings of Macbeth often integrate insights from both dualistic and problematic traditions. If they veer toward one or the other pole—as most ultimately do—they may still attempt to take into account at least some of the considerations that have fueled opposing arguments in the past.

The organization of the volume

The same tension and interplay characterizes the critical voices convened between the covers of this book. Our contributors employ multiple critical approaches to Macbeth, and to the questions that proliferate around it: from new historicism and cultural studies, to the theory and history of performance. Their essays refer to a wealth of past work on the play, while also illustrating many trends that animate today’s scholarship and creative practice.

Chapters 2 through 11 are arranged in a sequence roughly corresponding to the emergence of some of Macbeth’s major themes, as they arise in the tragedy and are taken up in turn by each contributor. Thus, the issues at play in Macbeth’s representations of monarchy and succession, Scottish history, and the male aristocratic community—all of which surface quickly in Act 1—are discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 4 (while some receive more scrutiny in chapter 8 and elsewhere). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 develop social and cultural, as well as psychological contexts for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who together dominate the play from the middle of Act 1 through the end of Act 3. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 address the interrelated discourses of socioeconomic instability and pathology, while spotlighting key passages in Acts 3, 4, and 5; two of these chapters illuminate the bit parts of the Murderers (3.1, 3.3) and both Doctors (4.3; 5.1). Chapter 10 is focused on depictions of emotion in two of the play’s later scenes (4.3; 5.9). Finally, readers who may specifically seek a viewpoint on Macbeth’s last soliloquy (5.5.16–27) may consult chapter 11.² In these thematic essays, each author’s purpose has been to offer useful guidance to existing debates, while at times proposing to open new avenues of inquiry. Another aim has been to supply more, more deliberate, and, in some cases, more controversial examples of close reading—as well as fuller and rather more up-to-date bibliographical resources—than are ordinarily found in brief critical guides, handbooks, and the like.

Chapters 11 and 12 both concern topics in the theory of performance, which abut interpretive questions in Macbeth. Chapters 13 through 17 then consider some noteworthy moments ...

Table of contents

• Shakespeare Criticism
• Contents
• List of figures and acknowledgments
• General Editor’s introduction
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sovereignty and treason in Macbeth
• 3 “A rooted sorrow”
• 4 The “peerless” Macbeth
• 5 “The servant to defect”
• 6 Macbeth’s equivocal conscience
• 7 Hired for mischief
• 8 Healing angels and “golden blood”
• 9 “Throw physic to the dogs!”
• 10 “Let grief convert to anger”
• 11 Like a poor player
• 12 “To be thus is nothing”
• 13 The personating of Queens
• 14 Politicizing Macbeth on U.S. stages
• 15 Macbeth in Chinese opera
• 16 Macbeth
• 17 Hypermedia Macbeth
• 18 Sunshine in Macbeth
• Notes on contributors
• Index