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No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Shakespeare’s Macbeth / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. â p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-884-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3431-4 (e-book) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Macbeth. 2. Macbeth, King of Scotland, 11th cent.—In literature. 3. Scotland—In literature. 4. Regicides in literature. 5. Murder in literature. 6. Villains in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Macbeth. PR2823.W48 2010 822.3'3—dc22 2010009946 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212)967-8800 or (800)322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: July 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Macbeth: Counter-Hamlet 7 James L. Calderwood “Born of Woman”: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth 33 Janet Adelman Macbeth Appalled (I) 61 Stanley Cavell Theology as Tragedy in Macbeth 73 Susan Snyder Who “Has No Children” in Macbeth? 85 Tom Clayton Macbeth: The Sexual Underplot 101 Ralph Berry Macbeth’s Three Murders 117 Robert Lanier Reid “No boasting like a fool”? Macbeth and Herod 131 R. Chris Hassel Jr. vi Contents Macbeth 165 Piotr Sadowski Chronology 179 Contributors 181 Bibliography 183 Acknowledgments 187 Index 189 Editor’s Note My introduction engages the ruthless economy of Macbeth, which has always seemed to me to be set in a Gnostic cosmos. James L. Calderwood traces the shadows of Hamlet that encircle and infl uence the later drama, after which Janet Adelman suggests that Macbeth solicits both a destructive maternal power and the desire to be free of it. Stanley Cavell contends that competing interpretations give rise to the melodramatic responsiveness that characterizes the play, while Susan Snyder weighs theological tradition and the work’s murky morality. Tom Clayton focuses on childlessness and ambiguous parentage, fol- lowed by Ralph Berry’s perusal of the ways the drama sexualizes regicide. Robert Lanier Reid moves beyond the defi nitive killing of the king to consider Macbeth’s entire murderous history, after which R. Chris Hassel Jr. returns to the legacy of Herod as one of Macbeth’s possible antecedents. Th e volume concludes with Piotr Sadowski’s assessment of the central char- acters and of the blending of mutually exclusive qualities evident in the title character. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Macbeth ought to be the least sympathetic of Shakespeare’s hero- villains. 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. Shakespeare has no single position in regard to the fantasy-making power, whether in Macbeth or in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Th e Tem- pest. Yet all these are visionary dramas and in some sense pragmatically exalt imagination even as they question it. But Macbeth is a tragedy, and a vision- ary tragedy is a strange genre. Like Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, Macbeth is a tragic protagonist, and yet like Claudius, Iago, and Edmund, Macbeth is a villain, indeed a monster of murderousness far surpassing the others. We 1 2 Harold Bloom fi nd it diffi cult, as we read or watch a performance of Macbeth, to think of its protagonist as a criminal dictator, a small-scale Hitler or Stalin, and yet he is pragmatically just that. I do not think that Macbeth’s wistful scruples, his nostalgias and regrets, draw us to him; he is never in any danger of collaps- ing back into the innocence he rarely ceases to crave. Th e reader and playgoer need to ask: “Why, even in despite of myself, do I identify with Macbeth, down to the very end?” It cannot be that Macbeth’s desires and ambitions essentially are our own, even if the Oedipal desire to slay the father (the good King Duncan) is universal. Even if we are all would-be usurpers, most of us presumably do not desire to terrorize our societies. Th e appeal of Macbeth, hardly to be resisted, seems to me at the heart of Shakespeare’s concerns in this great domestic tragedy of blood. Macbeth’s imagination is at once his greatest strength and his destruc- tive weakness, yet it does not provoke an ambivalence in us. We thrill to its poetic, expressionistic strength, whatever its consequences. Shakespeare, on some level, may be making a critique of his own imagination, which has much in common with Macbeth’s, and yet the play is anything but a condemnation of the Macbethian imagination. Indeed, as Macbeth increasingly becomes outraged by the equivocal nature of the occult promises that have been made to him, his sense of being outraged contaminates us, so that we come to share in his outrage. He becomes our paradigm of confounded expectations, and we are moved by him as we are moved by Captain Ahab, who in Melville’s Moby-Dick plays the role of an American Macbeth. Ahab is not a murderer, and yet his obsessive hunt for Moby Dick destroys the Pequod and its entire crew, except for the storytelling Ishmael.