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203 Pages·2010·1.47 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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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
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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
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Contributing editor: Pamela Loos
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Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY
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Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY
Date printed: July 2010
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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
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