Macbeth - William Shakespeare, New Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) PDF
Preview Macbeth - William Shakespeare, New Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Th e Adventures of Th e Great Gatsby One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn Gulliver’s Travels Solitude Th e Age of Innocence Hamlet Othello Alice’s Adventures in Heart of Darkness Persuasion Wonderland Th e House on Mango Portnoy’s Complaint All Quiet on the Street Pride and Prejudice Western Front I Know Why the Ragtime Animal Farm Caged Bird Sings Th e Red Badge of Th e Ballad of the Sad Th e Iliad Courage Café Invisible Man Romeo and Juliet Beloved Jane Eyre Th e Rubáiyát of Omar Beowulf Th e Joy Luck Club Black Boy Khayyám Julius Caesar Th e Bluest Eye Th e Scarlet Letter Th e Jungle Th e Canterbury Tales A Separate Peace King Lear Cat on a Hot Tin Silas Marner Long Day’s Journey Roof Slaughterhouse-Five into Night Catch-22 Lord of the Flies Song of Solomon Th e Catcher in the Th e Lord of the Rings Th e Sound and the Rye Love in the Time of Fury Th e Chronicles of Cholera Th e Stranger Narnia Macbeth A Streetcar Named Th e Color Purple Th e Man Without Desire Crime and Qualities Sula Punishment Th e Crucible Th e Merchant of Th e Sun Also Rises Cry, the Beloved Venice Th e Tale of Genji Th e Metamorphosis Country A Tale of Two Cities A Midsummer Night’s Darkness at Noon “Th e Tell-Tale Heart” Dream Death of a Salesman and Other Stories Miss Lonelyhearts Th e Death of Artemio Th eir Eyes Were Moby-Dick Cruz Watching God My Ántonia Th e Diary of Anne Th ings Fall Apart Frank Native Son Th e Th ings Th ey Don Quixote Night Carried Emerson’s Essays 1984 To Kill a Mockingbird Emma Th e Odyssey Ulysses Fahrenheit 451 Oedipus Rex A Farewell to Arms Th e Old Man and the Waiting for Godot Frankenstein Sea Th e Waste Land Th e Glass Menagerie On the Road Wuthering Heights Th e Grapes of Wrath One Flew over the Young Goodman Great Expectations Cuckoo’s Nest Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations William Shakespeare’s Macbeth New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Macbeth—New Edition Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. 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. 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 M acbeth 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
The list of books you might like
