The sounds of supernatural soliciting in Macbeth

Studies in Philology

Volumn 100, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 346-383

  Kranz, David L ^a  

^a DICKINSON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 28244497913     PISSN: 00393738     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sip.2003.0013     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Quotations from Macbeth follow the Arden edition, Second Series, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1984). Quotations from other Shakespearean plays are also taken from Arden editions
2. George Walton Williams, " 'Time for such a word': Verbal Echoing in Macbeth," Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 153-59, is the most recent of many to make this point
3. His limited focus on so few repeated words spread over several acts, however, raises questions about audience recognition of the patterns. Repeated diction, moreover, can be found in any play and does little to highlight the distinctive quality of Macbeth. Finding only evil in the play's many echoes also seems unnecessarily limiting. By contrast, Madeleine Doran's "The Macbeth Music," Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 153-73, sees the play as a musical composition involving a number of "patterns of recurrence," including theme, voice, diction, alliteration, assonance, paronomasia, rhyme, and isocolon. However, except to see this "music" as a vague circulation of moral ambiguity, Doran does little to analyze the style in detail
4. Quoted phrase from L. C. Knights, as quoted in Frank Kermode's introduction to Macbeth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1311
5. See Margaret D. Burrell, "Macbeth: A Study in Paradox," Shakespeare Jahrbuch 90 (1954): 167-90, who finds a plethora of antonymic clauses, dual rhetorical constructions, and "contrapuntal rhythms," which she labels the "double talk" of the play
6. See G. I. Duthie, "Antithesis in 'Macbeth,'" Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 5-33
7. H. N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 294
8. In scanning the verse of Macbeth, I have endeavored to follow the metrical views of George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
9. Paul, Royal Play, 262-63
10. Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1596-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 273-74
11. Coburn Freer, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 35
12. See Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603- 1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 75-78 and passim
13. and Paul, Royal Play, 1-13, 317-31, and passim
14. More recently, Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13-31 and passim, believes that Macbeth is a topical play, structured as a response to the Gunpowder Plot and written for James I's approval
15. For a qualifying counterargument, see Michael Hawkins, "History, Politics, and Macbeth," in Focus on "Macbeth," ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 1982), 155-88, esp. 158, 176, and 185-88
16. See Williams, "Verbal Echoing," 154-56
17. See Huston Diehl, "Horrid Image, Sorry Sight, Fatal Vision: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth," Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 191-203, for the view that Macbeth fails morally because he creates but does not understand the images that seduce and haunt him
18. See also Arnold Stein, "Macbeth and Word-Magic," Sewanee Review 59 (1951): 271-84, for the idea that Macbeth falls on account of his self-conscious verbal magic, powers he uses on and for himself alone. My own opinion is that Macbeth's use of language is as much out of his conscious control as in it, and that the rush of his poetry motivates his actions as much as the images his imagination generates
19. Glynne Wickham, "Hell Castle and its Door-keeper," Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 68-74
20. See Frederic B. Tromly, "Macbeth and His Porter," Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 151-56, who contends that "the Porter describes the power of drink in terms which suggest demoniacal possession" (155), a state closely associated with Renaissance witchcraft and one that Lady Macbeth (1.5.40-54) and her husband (3.2.46-53) try to will for themselves
21. See S. T. Coleridge, Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terrenee Hawkes (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1959), 197
22. See Robert West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1968), 41-55 and 72-79
23. Kathryn Briggs, Pale Hecate's Team (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 77-81, 222
24. Arthur McGee, " 'Macbeth' and the Furies," Shakespeare Survey (1966): 55-67
25. Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr., The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1965), 168-71
26. and Anthony Harris, Night's Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 33-63
27. Harris, Night's Black Agents, 7-19
28. and Kernan, King's Playwright, 83-87
29. See Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972)
30. and Donald W. Foster, "Macbeth's War on Time," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 319-42
31. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: I (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), 124
32. Paul, Royal Play, 15-24, 162-82
33. McGee, "'Macbeth' and the Furies," 56-57
34. James I, Daernonologie, in the Forme of a Dialogue (1597), ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Curwen, 1924), xiv
35. See Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 99-100
36. W. C. Curry, Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), 86-87
37. Wills, Witches and Jesuits, 51-74, goes even further; he thinks Macbeth himself is a male witch
38. See Alistair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964)
39. A. Kent Hieatt, Short Time's Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960)
40. and Frances Yates, The Theatre of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 67
41. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner (New York: Odyssey, 1963)
42. Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), almost suggests as much
43. My discussion of numerology is indebted to Vincent F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (1938; New York, Cooper Square, 1969)
44. Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970)
45. S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Politics (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1974)
46. and John MacQueen, Numerology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985); as well as to Fowler and Shumaker as cited in nn. 34 and 30 above
47. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, ed. Vernon J. Bourke, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. Honan (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958), 11.30
48. and Butler, Number Symbolism, 24-25
49. Heninger, Sweet Harmony, 194
50. Shumaker, Occult Sciences, 138
51. Ibid
52. Fowler, Numbers of Time, 18-23
53. and Wright's The Passions of the minde in general (1604)
54. See Ruth L. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays, University of Iowa Studies 3.4 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1927)
55. and E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975)
56. K. Tetzeli von Rosador, '"Supernatural soliciting': Temptation and Imagination in Dr. Faustus and Macbeth," in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 42-59, suggests that Renaissance witches are agents of cosmic conflict who operate by distorting their vietims' imagistic perceptions. My analysis suggests that the witches do not thrive by images alone
57. D. F. Rauber, "Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth," Criticism 11 (1969): 59-67
58. See Harry Berger, Jr., "The Early Scenes in Macbeth : Preface to a New Interpretation," ELH 47 (1980): 17
59. Stanley Kozikowski, "The Gowrie Conspiracy against James VI: A New Source for Shakespeare's Macbeth," Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 206. 53 Ibid., 202
60. E. B. Lyle, "The 'Twofold Balls and Treble Scepters' in Macbeth," Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 516-19, whose interpretation is based on panegyrics to James in Gwinn's Tres Sibyllae and George Buc's Daplmis Poly Stephanos
61. See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; New York: Fawcett, 1966)
62. D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (1938; Garden City: Doubleday, 1969)
63. Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Invention of Man (1942; New York: Macmillan, 1961)
64. Roy Walker, The Time is Free: A Study of Macbeth (London: Dakers, 1949)
65. G. R. Elliott, Dramatic Providence in "Macbeth" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958)
66. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)
67. L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959)
68. and Curry, Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns. The obvious exception is G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930; London: Methuen, 1962)
69. Wills, Witches and Jesuits
70. and George Walton Williams, "Macbeth: King James's Play," South Atlantic Review 47.2 (1982): 12-21
71. and Stephen Booth, "King Lear," "Macbeth," Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), who argues that in-definition in the play is barely contained by its tragic form
72. The New Historicists include Michael Hawkins, "History, Politics, and Macbeth," in Focus on "Macbeth," ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 155-88
73. and Stephen Mullaney, "Lying Like Truth: Riddle, Representation, and Treason in Renaissance England" ELH 47 (1980): 32-47, who points out the "amphibology" (ambiguity) of treasonous discourse in early modern England
74. Another formalist, Berger, "Early Scenes," contends that the shape of the play is ironic, that Cawdor, Macbeth, Macduff, and Malcolm are all rebels and/or regicides, and that the early scenes suggest how competitive warrior values assumed by all the characters render unsatisfactory simple moral distinctions between them. Moreover, Booth, "King Lear," believes that Shakespeare manipulates theatrical experience to work against an audience's acceptance of the so-called good characters in Macbeth. Foster, "War on Time," thinks Malcolm and Macduff are clearly part of a cycle of repeated revenge and disorder. Jonathan Goldberg, "Macbeth and Source," in Poststnicturalist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machen and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 38-58, arguing from deconstructive principles about the limited hegemony of dominant discourses, says Shakespeare did not make his characters overtly good or evil
75. Karen S. Coddon, "'Unreal Mockery': Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth," ELH 56 (1989): 485-501, in a New Historical postmodern analysis, goes even further by suggesting that Macbeth should not be considered an individual person but, rather, the product of a social disorder reflective of the precarious political foundations of Jacobean England
76. See Arthur Kirsch, "Macbeth's Suicide," ELH 51 (1984): 269-96
77. and Robert Reid, "Macbeth's Three Murders: Shakespearean Psychology and Tragic Form," Renaissance Papers (1991):75-92, for essays that incorporate but ultimately reject recent critical claims
78. See Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
79. John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)
80. and Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), for attacks on contemporary literary theory and some of its Renaissance applications
81. See Robin Grove, " 'Multiplying villainies of nature,' " in Focus on "Macbeth," ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 113-39, who thinks that nature in Macbeth is equivocal
82. and John Stachniewski, "Calvinist Psychology in Macbeth," Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 169-89, who thinks that Calvinist predestination is the providential force that works in the psyche of Macbeth throughout the play
83. See James L. Calderwood, If It Were Done: "Macbeth" and Tragic Action (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), for a balanced view of the play. Calderwood believes that the structure of Macbeth is both progressively linear and cyclical, sees in its repetitions both barren augmentation and procreative increase, and finds that negative judgments of Malcolm and Macduff, while serious, do not obliterate the Tightness of their actions at the end