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REVIEW
- McHarg, Ross, and James Robertson. Discover Explore Macbeth — Literary Criticism.
- <http://www.thelandofmacbeth.com/criticism.htm>
Visited: 5 September 2003
Note: The actual content is available only as zipped PDF files, so you have to have two programs on your computer, the un-zipper and Adobe Acrobat.
Contents: Two downloadable PDF files, "Macbeth criticism (by A.C.Bradley)" and "modern literary theoretical approaches."
The selections from Bradley are more easily available on another part of the Shakespeare Navigators site, A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, but the "modern literary theoretical approaches" are only to be found on the "Discover Explore Macbeth" site.
The site authors write of the "modern literary theoretical approaches":
this section contains introductions to the major school of literary theory which have challenged the traditional "liberal humanist" approach of critics such as A.C. Bradley. Most of these critical movements began to hold great sway from the 1960's onward and have permanently affected literary criticism by calling into question the social/political/gendered bias of literary works and literary criticism.
There are seven essays, all about 1200 words in length. Each essay is authored by a scholar of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. Following is a list of the essays, along with some representative extracts:
- Thomson, Karin. "Physcoanalytical [sic.] Criticism."
The following essay deals with the effects of repressed emotion on the conscious and unconscious states of Lady Macbeth.
Awake, Lady Macbeth exhibits emotionless cruelty, while in a somnambulistic state she shows pity and remorse. Her sleeping personality must be taken as her true one because the unconscious is uninhibited and uncensored. Her true self is more powerful than the false warrior queen she plays
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Kingsley, Jane. "Christian Perspectives on Macbeth."
Providence can be seen in the destruction of the criminal Macbeth; the restoration of Scotland to its rightful heir and the end of Macbeth's dark reign; but above all, in God's victory against Satan. One question the Christian critic must answer is why God has not intervened sooner.
Neither of these perspectives allows for the complexity of Macbeth's characterisation nor for his own lack of religious guilt. He does not show any repentance at the end nor does he recognise his crimes as crimes against God . . . .
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Stec, Victoria. "Macbeth: 'The frame of Things Disjoint' or Deconstruction Enacted."
The words 'fair is foul and foul is fair' (1.1.10) shake our whole universe of meaning. If either can signify the other, where do we look to for stability, or is there no such thing as stability in the world of Macbeth? A world where everything is clearly and correctly labelled is a safe and comforting place. A world where labels can be erased is threatening to contemplate. The crisis at the heart of Macbeth is in some ways a perfect expression of what some 20th century theorists call 'deconstruction'. It is important, though, to keep in mind that when considering the play in this light, we are imposing a modern day notion on the play, which it was not written to fit.
Perhaps the deconstructionist view can be thought of as being like a game of charades — the word itself cannot be uttered and you use many words to get around it and communicate what you mean to others. Except that, for the deconstructionist, there is no word waiting to be revealed, for the real essence of anything is incommunicable. Any word that is revealed will still be a charade and the game is never over. To consider a play in this way is therefore to open up endless interesting questions but to offer no conclusions.
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Cakebread, Caroline. "Macbeth and Feminism."
Shakespeare's witches exist on the fringes of a society in which feminine attributes denote powerlessness and destruction (Duncan, Lady Macduff) and in which traditionally masculine values are equated with power.
In the end, it is in the divide between male and female worlds in Macbeth that the nucleus of tragedy lies.
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Ropp, Wiatt. "New Historicist Criticism: Macbeth and Power."
According to new historicism, our own relationship to power is similar to that of Shakespeare's: we collaborate with the power that controls us. Without necessarily realizing what we are doing, we help create and sustain it, thus reducing the need for authority figures to remind us what to do or think. Once we accept the cultural limitations imposed on our thought and behaviour, once we believe that the limits of the permissible are the extent of the possible, then we happily police ourselves.
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Ropp, Wiatt. "Marxist Criticism: Macbeth as Ideology."
Modern political critics argue that Shakespeare's plays ingeniously subvert establishment orthodoxy by exposing how power and ideology operate in society (see Greenblatt, Dollimore, and Kavanagh). Their arguments are intriguing, but rather than assume that Shakespeare's plays exemplify a modern political attitude, it is just as easy to believe that literary critics are simply skilled at reading him in such a way as to give credence to their own beliefs (Levin 500-2). Regardless of Shakespeare's intentions or political motivations, it is how his plays have been used that indicates their true cultural significance. As I have argued, Macbeth, like the rest of his plays, has proved useful, in his time and ours, as ideological support for the beliefs that our social order and established authority is fair and that those who threaten it deserve whatever punishment and suffering they get.
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Kinnaird, Patrick. "Structuralist criticism and Macbeth."
In his essay of 1968, 'The Death of the Author', [Barthe] argued that authors were unable to express a novel or individual vision in any meaningful sense because he was forced to work within the system of signifiers which constituted his language and culture: anything he might write was 'always already written'. The effect of this on literary criticism was to fundamentally question the concept of realism in plot and in the psychological portrayal of character, which had been so much a part of the inheritance from A.C. Bradley.
Ultimately it seems that structuralism has not proved an attractive way of analysing Shakespeare's dramatic works.
Bottom Line: Good for a quick look at the kind of thing literary scholars are up to these days.
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