Macbeth

Abstract

Less discussion has been devoted to character and motive in twentieth-century criticism of Macbeth than in criticism of any of the other major tragedies. L. C. Knights’ “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” seems effectually to have inhibited subsequent critics from building upon the insights of Bradley. As G. K. Hunter has observed, it has “become something of a cliche of modern criticism to say that the essential structure of Macbeth is ‘to be sought in the poetry’ (L. C. Knights), that the characters ‘are not shaped primarily to conform to a psychological verisimilitude, but to make explicit the intellectual statements with which the play is concerned’ (Irving Ribner), that Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, and Banquo ‘are parts of a pattern, a design; are images or symbols’ (A. P. Rossiter)” (1977, 6). In his 1973 survey of Shakespearean criticism, Ronald Berman reported that “there has been no better study of the character of the principals” than Bradley’s (125), and the situation has not changed greatly since then. Even psychoanalytic critics have eschewed the analysis of motives. They have been “content,” as Norman Holland said, “to consider the characters as projections of psychological impulses rather than [as] portraits of those impulses in ‘real’ people. The witches, ghosts, and prophecies of Macbeth would seem almost to force this kind of reading, and it is no bad thing” (1966, 230). The fullest discussion of character occurs in Marvin Rosenberg’s The Masks of Macbeth (1978), and one of the most striking things about his account is how much more actors, actresses, and directors have contributed to our understanding of the principals than have literary critics.¹