Macbeth

Critical Essays

Samuel Schoenbaum, Samuel Schoenbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317485445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1991. Collecting together commentary and critique on 'the Scottish play', this book showcases varied discussions of the text and the theatrical productions. From Samuel Johnson's brief 1765 comment to the editor's own piece on the Porter's scene, the texts included here are popular important accounts of thoughts and scholarship on the play over the years. Some pieces address the most famous early Lady Macbeth – Mrs Siddons, while others look at a theme or specific issue such as Lady Macbeth's children. This is a great sample of the voluminous body of work looking at the tragedy, considering its images, symbols, meanings and its challenges for the stage.

From How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

L. C. Knights

DOI: 10.4324/9781315709277-10

Part I

I

For some years there have been signs of a re-orientation of Shakespeare criticism. The books that I have in mind have little in common with the majority of those that have been written on Shakespeare, but they are likely to have a decisive influence upon criticism in the future. The present, therefore, is a favourable time in which to take stock of the traditional methods, and to inquire why so few of the many books that have been written are relevant to our study of Shakespeare as a poet. The inquiry involves an examination of certain critical presuppositions, and of these the most fruitful of irrelevancies is the assumption that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a great “creator of characters.” So extensive was his knowledge of the human heart (so runs the popular opinion) that he was able to project himself into the minds of an infinite variety of men and women and present them “real as life” before us. Of course, he was a great poet as well, but the poetry is an added grace which gives to the atmosphere of the plays a touch of “magic” and which provides us with the thrill of single memorable lines and lyric passages.

This assumption that it is the main business of a writer—other than the lyric poet—to create characters is not, of course, confined to criticism of Shakespeare, it long ago invaded criticism of the novel. “Character creation,” says Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, “is regarded as the very essence of English fiction, the sine qua non of novel writing.” And in a recent book of extracts from Scott, Mr. Hugh Walpole writes:

The test of a character in any novel is that it should have existed before the book that reveals it to us began and should continue after the book is closed…. These are our friends for life—but it is the penalty of the more subconscious school of modern fiction that, when the book is closed, all that we have in our hands is a boot-button, a fragment of tulle, or a cocktail shaker. We have dived, it seems, so very deep and come to the surface again with so little in our grasp…. But [he continues] however gay, malicious, brilliant and amusing they [modern novels] may be, this hard business of creating a world for us, a world filled with people in whom we may believe, whom we may know better than we know our friends, is the gift of the very few.¹

It should be obvious that a criterion for the novel by which we should have to condemn Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and the bulk of the work of D.H. Lawrence does not need to be very seriously considered.

There is no need to search for examples in the field of Shakespeare criticism. In the latest book on Shakespeare that has come to hand, we read: “His creations are not ideas but characters—real men and women, fellow humans with ourselves. We can follow their feelings and thoughts like those of our most intimate acquaintances.”² The case is seen better illustrated by Ellen Terry’s recently published Lectures on Shakespeare. To her the characters are all flesh and blood and she exercises her ingenuity on such questions as whether Portia or Bellario thought of the famous quibble, and whether it was justified.³ And how did the Boy in Henry V learn to speak French? “Robin’s French is quite fluent. Did he learn to speak the lingo from Prince Hal, or from Falstaff in London, or did he pick it up during his few weeks in France with the army?”⁴ Ellen Terry of course does not represent critical Authority; the point is not that she could write as she did, but that the book was popular. Most of the reviewers were enthusiastic. The Times Literary Supplement said that the book showed “the insight of a genius,” and the reviewer in the Times, speaking of her treatment of Falstaff’s page, declared, “To Ellen Terry, Robin was as alive and as real as could be; and we feel as if she had given us a new little friend to laugh with and be sorry for.”

And if we wish for higher authority we have only to turn to the book by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, On Reading Shakespeare. Mr. Smith demands respect as the author of Words and Idioms, in which he showed the kind of interest in language needed for the critical approach to Shakespeare. But there is nothing of that interest in the present essay. Here Shakespeare is praised because he provides “the illusion of reality,” because he puts “living people” upon the stage, because he creates characters who are “independent of the work in which they appear … and when the curtain falls they go on living in our imaginations and remain as real to us as our familiar friends.”—“Those inhabitants of the world of poetry who, in our imagination, lead their immortal lives apart.”⁵

The most illustrious example is, of course, Dr. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. The book is too well known to require much descriptive comment, but it should be observed that the Notes, in which the detective interest supersedes the critical, form a logical corollary to the main portions of the book. In the Lectures on Macbeth we learn that Macbeth was “exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by temper. The tendency must have been greatly strengthened by his marriage.” But “it is difficult to be sure of his customary demeanour.” And Dr. Bradley seems surprised that “This bold ambitious man of action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet.” These minor points are symptomatic. It is assumed throughout the book that the most profitable discussion of Shakespeare’s tragedies is in terms of the characters of which they are composed.—“The centre of the tragedy may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action…. What we feel strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare, ‘character is destiny’ is no doubt an exaggeration … but it is the exaggeration of a vital truth.” It is this which leads Dr. Bradley to ask us to imagine Posthumus in the place of Othello, Othello in the place of Posthumus, and to conjecture upon Hamlet’s whereabouts at the time of his father’s death.

The influence of the assumption is pervasive. No only are all the books of Shakespeare criticism (with a very few exceptions) based upon it, it invades scholarship (the notes to the indispensable Arden edition may be called in evidence), and in school children are taught to think they have “appreciated” the poet if they are able to talk about the characters—aided no doubt by the neat summaries provided by Mr. Verity which they learn so assiduously before examinations.

In the mass of Shakespeare criticism there is not a hint that “character”—like “plot,” “rhythm,” “construction” and all our other critical counters—is merely an abstraction from the total response in the mind of the reader or spectator, brought into being by written or spoken words; that the critic therefore—however far he may ultimately range—begins with the words of which a play is composed. This applies equally to the novel or any other form of art that uses language as its medium. “A Note on Fiction” by Mr. C.H. Rickword in The Calendar of Modern Letters expresses the point admirably with regard to the novel: “The form of a novel only exists as a balance of response on the part of the reader. Hence schematic plot is a construction of the reader’s that corresponds to an aspect of the response and stands in merely diagrammatic relation to the source. Only as precipitates from the memory are plot or character tangible; yet only in solution have either any emotive valency.”⁶

A Shakespeare play is a dramatic poem. It uses action, gesture, formal grouping and symbols, and it relies upon the general conventions governing Elizabethan plays. But, we cannot too often remind ourselves, its end is to communicate a rich and controlled experience by means of words—words used in a way to which, without some training, we are no longer accustomed to respond. To stress in the conventional way character or plot or any of the other abstractions that can be made is to impoverish the total response. “It is in the total situation rather than in the wrigglings of individual emotion that the tragedy lies.”⁷ “We should not look for perfect verisimilitude to life,” says Mr. Wilson Knight, “but rather see each play as an expanded metaphor, by means of which the original vision has been projected into forms roughly correspondent with actuality, conforming thereto with greater or less exactitude according to the demands of its nature…. The persons, ultimately, are not human at all, but purely symbols of a poetic vision.”⁸

It would be easy to demonstrate that this approach is essential even when dealing with plays like Hamlet or Macbeth which can be made to yield something very impressive in the way of “character.” And it is the only approach which will enable us to say anything at all relevant about plays like Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida which have consistently baffled the critics. And apart from Shakespeare, what are we to say of Tamburlaine, Edward II, The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Changeling if we do not treat them primarily as poems?

Read with attention, the plays themselves supply the clue of how they should be read. But those who prefer another kind of evidence have only to consider the contemporary factors that conditioned the making of an Elizabethan play, namely the native tradition of English drama descending from the morality plays, the construction of the playhouse and the conventions depending, in part, upon that construction, and the tastes and expectations of the audience. I have not space to deal with any of these in detail. Schiicking has shown how large a part was played in the Elizabethan drama by “primitive technique,” but the full force of the morality tradition remains to be investigated. It is, I think, impossible to appreciate Troilus and Cressida on the one hand, or the plays of Middleton (and even of Ben Jonson) on the other, without an understanding of the “morality” elements that they contain. As for the second factor, the physical peculiarities of the stage and Elizabethan dramatic conventions, I can only refer to Miss Bradbrook’s Elizabethan Stage Conditions. We can make a hasty summary by saying that each of these factors determined that Elizabethan drama should be non-realistic, conditioned by conventions that helped to govern the total response obtained by means of the language of each play. A consideration of Shakespeare’s use of language demands a consideration of the reading and listening habits of his audienc...