Macbeth and Criminology

MACBETH AND CRIMINOLOGY JEFFREY R. WILSON This article—really a series of three essays—adDresses the Dynamic and mutually benefcial relationship between Shakespeare studies and criminology. In the scant scholarship considering this connec- tion, the play Macbeth has emergeD—with its murders and madnesses and crises of masculinity—as a source of fascination for criminologists (as well as criminals themselves).1 BuilDing out from this historical curiosity, my take is both more textual and more theoretical. I use the example of Macbeth to illustrate, frst, how criminological theories can help us improve our understanDing of Shakespeare’s plays anD, seconD, how Shakespeare’s plays can help us improve our criminological theories. I contend that Shakespeare was doing an early version of what we now call “criminology”—understood as the formal stuDy of crime, criminals, criminal law, criminal justice, and social ills that could or should be criminalizeD—when he wrote trageDies such as Macbeth.2 UnderstanDing criminology as such, I have avoided saying that it is a “modern” and “scientifc” discipline, which might rufe some criminologists’ feathers, but I have done so because criminologists have at times acknowleDged conceptual precedents for their theories in Shakespeare’s plays and used his plays as evidence for their ideas, calling into question the notion that criminology is a purely scientifc enterprise associated with the modern age.3 COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 46.2 Spring 2019 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2019 454 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 46.2 Spring 2019 Shakespeare’s humanistic anD early-moDern criminology in Mac- beth, conducted through the resources of dramatic expression pro- vided by the genre of trageDy, taps into the question that really Drives all criminology: Who is to blame, the individual or the society? Like modern criminology, Macbeth’s multiple responses to this question are circumstantial, complex, and qualifed. The frst section below, “Gender and Crime in Macbeth,” shows how Shakespeare has sur- faced in works of criminology and how his works can be used to test existing criminological theories and generate new ones. The second section, “The American Dream and the Scottish Play,” shows how criminological theories can aid a literary analysis of Shakespeare’s Drama. And the third section, “Madness, Murder, and MeDicine in Macbeth,” shows how criminological theories can infuence modern Shakespearean performance and also how modern performances infuenced by criminological theories can open up new insights on Shakespeare’s original text. The suggestion that there exists some more than casual afnity between Shakespeare’s art and criminology has implications for the way we tell the story of criminology.4 This story is usually told as a tale of progress through four successive schools of thought Dis- tinguished by time perioD, methoD, and argument. First came the classical school—founded by Cesare Beccaria and associated with Enlightenment rationalism—which proDuced philosophical essays on the causes and prevention of crime and which saw crime as a rational choice made after weighing the risks and rewarDs of break- ing the law (what Jeremy Bentham called a “utilitarian calculus”). The classical school was Displaced late in the nineteenth century by the positive school, also called the biological school, founded by Cesare Lombroso, who sought to stuDy the criminal and not the crime because he was convinced that criminality was a biological phenomenon to be adDressed using the nascent methodologies of the natural sciences. When the positive school’s theory of the “born criminal” was falsifed and exposed as bigotry masquerading as science early in the twentieth century, two new schools emerged to fll the void, each retaining a scientifc pretense, but each operating more as a social science than a natural one. First came a psychological school of criminology, associated with Sigmund Freud and his followers, which treated crime as the result of wayward mental processes (or sometimes entirely normal mental processes). Then came a sociological school which saw culture, rather than nature or minD, as the root cause of crime. Criminologists toDay usually bypass these Jefrey R. Wilson | ESSAYS 455 totalizing methodological disputes in an efort to develop integrated theories that address the causation and prevention of specifc crimes and kinDs of crime. Recent criminology has also been keen to qual- ify the determinism of the biological, psychological, and sociological schools—which each treat crime as the proDuct of some force beyond that of inDiviDual choice, whether that force is nature, minD, or culture—resulting in the emergence of a neoclassical school which sees crime as the outcome of free will exercised in the context of often imposing conDitions. The possibility of a Shakespearean criminology complicates this story, not only because Shakespeare pre-DateD the purported beginnings of criminology by nearly two centuries, but also because much recent criminology is remarkably Shakespearean in its sen- sibilities. Criminology remains Deeply committeD to the quanti- tative methoDology of the sciences, but there has been a (re)turn to qualitative, philosophical, rational analysis in the neoclassical school, in the calls for theoretical integration, anD in the emergence of unorthodox (non-scientifc, non-academic, non-argumentative) approaches to criminology such as “cultural criminology,” “popular criminology,” anD “public criminology.”5 The notion of linear progress in criminology thus becomes suspect, anD the ipso facto privi- leging of scientifc argument over humanistic art falls away. If ideas DepicteD in anD implieD by Shakespeare’s Drama anticipateD those later argueD in the Discourse of criminology, anD recent aDvances in criminology attest to the value of artistic treatments of crime anD justice such as those in Shakespeare’s plays, then Shakespeare has a signifcant, surprising, and unacknowledged role in both the history anD the future of criminology. Thus, for Shakespeareans, this article is an invitation to extend the practice of reading Shakespeare beyond literary and cultural theory and into the theoretical Discourse most pertinent to trag- eDy, namely criminology. For criminologists, this piece points for- ward to a new frontier of integration: joining with the humanities to ask how the resources of humanistic thought, both classical art and contemporary scholarship, can help us better understand and pre- vent crime. Pushed to its utmost limit, the argument developed in this article starts to theorize the notion that Shakespearean trageDy and modern criminology exhibit a historical and conceptual afnity because the two discourses are diferent responses from two very diferent historical settings to the same question: Why do some people cause harm to others? 456 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 46.2 Spring 2019 I. “ALL THAT MAY BECOME A MAN”: GENDER AND CRIME IN MACBETH In Criminal Man (1876), which many criminologists regard as the foundational work of their feld, Caesar Lombroso—famous for his theory of the “born criminal” whose biological propensity for crime can be detected through phrenology—cited Shakespeare’s play Mac- beth as evidence of a criminality that is specifc to women: Everyone agrees that the few violent women far exceed men in their ferocity and cruelty. The brigand women of southern Italy and the female revolutionaries of Paris invented unspeakable tortures. It was women who sold the fesh of policemen; who forced a man to eat his own penis; and who threaDed human boDies on a pike. Thus Shakespeare Depicts LaDy Macbeth as more cruel and cold than her male accomplice. (Lombroso 1876, 67) It is shocking to see one of Shakespeare’s characters cited just after a series of historical examples in a work of social science. The foun- Dation of the social sciences is the notion that rational, philosophical, humanistic, and artistic thought on culture and society—the kind of thing Shakespeare Did in his plays—is inferior to conclu- sions drawn from hard empirical data of the sort that flls Lom- broso’s book. In this line of thought, the musings of someone like Shakespeare, without quantifable support, are purely speculative. But Lombroso’s citation of Shakespeare represents a slippage in the lines drawn between humanistic and scientifc thought on crime. In this moment, Shakespeare was not an aery artist but an intellectual authority whose writings were cited for support. Thus, even the founder of the “positive” school of criminology, which insisted that ideas and policies on crime should only be Drawn from scien- tifcally verifed data, had recourse to methods and ideas from the “classical” school that he was arguing against. Lombroso’s citation of Shakespeare can stand for the fact that, while it presents itself as a “scientifc” discipline, criminology always has and always will draw from and contribute to “humanistic” thought on crime. IndeeD, Shakespeare anticipated by almost three centuries the “masculinity hypothesis” presented in Lombroso’s follow-up book, Criminal Woman (1893), which argued that the few crimes committed by women are committed by women who have biological and psychological traits similar to those of men. The Shakespearean version of this idea came in the soliloquy from Lady Macbeth which describes criminality as a gendered phenomenon: Jefrey R. Wilson | ESSAYS 457 Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fll me from the crown to the toe topful Of direst cruelty!6 Before getting into this famous passage, I want to note that Lom- broso absolutely loved Shakespeare. In adDition to Lady Macbeth, Lombroso gave Macbeth, Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, and King Lear as examples of his criminological ideas.7 One of his many writings on genius (the fipside to his science of the criminal) begins with a glow- ing quotation from the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach: “The intellectual operations of scientists are not substantially diferent from those of artists.

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