William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Abstract

Macbeth ought to be the least sympathetic of Shakespeare’s herovillains. He is a murderer of old men, women, and children and has a particular obsession with overcoming time by murdering the future: hence his failed attempt to kill Fleance and his successful slaughter of Macduff ’s children. And yet the playgoer and the reader cannot resist identifying with the imagination of Macbeth. A great killing machine, Macbeth has few attributes beyond imagination to recommend him, and that imagination itself is anything but benign. Yet it is open to the powers of the air and of the night: Occult, mediumlike, prophetic, and moral at least in part, it must be the most singular imagination in all of Shakespeare’s plays. And yet it has great limitations; it is not much allied to Macbeth’s far more ordinary, indeed inadequate intellectual powers. Its autonomy, together with its desperate strength, is what destroys all of Macbeth’s victims and at last Macbeth himself. Imagination or “fantasy” is an equivocal term in the Renaissance, where it can mean both poetic furor, a personal replacement for divine inspiration, and a loss in reality, perhaps as a consequence of such a displacement of sacred by secular.