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What Makes Macbeth Run?: Two British Superstars Work It Out
| Article
# : |
14577 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
2,302 Words |
| Author
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George Szamuely
George Szamuely writes for Commentary and The Wall Street
Journal. He is a former editor of the Times Literary
Supplement. |
Of all Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Macbeth is perhaps the one most difficult to fathom. On the face of it, his villainy is at least equal to that of Richard III or Iago or Edmund. He commits the most heinous crime of all--regicide--murdering a king, moreover, who has been his benefactor and patron. He then goes on to kill his closest friend, and has no compunctions about slaughtering little children. His brutal decapitation at the hands of a man who had hitherto displayed a notable lack of courage is the kind of humiliating death and disfigurement that Shakespeare liked to reserve for the least worthy specimens of humanity.
Yet, for all that, Macbeth remains a tragic hero: He is possessed of a reflective temperament, a magnanimity of character, and an almost childlike vulnerability that make his doom as poignant as those of Hamlet, Lear, and Othello.
It has often been said that what distinguishes modern from classical tragedy is that the central protagonist does not stand helplessly awaiting the fate that the gods had willed for him long before he had even been born. On the contrary, the Hamlets, the Brutuses, the Othellos bring about their own downfall through weaknesses of character that had remained hidden not only from everyone around them, but even from themselves. Their coming to self-knowledge coincides with death and madness.
Ghosts and Visions
But somehow Macbeth fails to conform to this pattern. For one thing, the abiding impression the theatergoer is left with is that he has witnessed supernatural events. The play is full of witches, dreams, prophecies, sleepwalking, ghosts, visions. It is difficult to think of another work by Shakespeare where human beings seem so helpless and where rational thought surrenders so abjectly before primeval fear. And the reason is because the play leaves us constantly in doubt as to how much of the disaster that has wrecked the lives of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth has come to pass as a result of their greed and scheming, and how much has come through the intervention of some kind of deities who have chosen to have some fun, forcing this couple into making a vulgar and unseemly spectacle of itself. Does Macbeth shape his circumstances or has he been shaped by them? Since Shakespeare leaves ambiguous the issue of whether Macbeth is victim or villain, performance of this play can be categorized as those that give it to us as if it were a classical tragedy and those that assimilate it into the rest of the Shakespearean tragic
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