Page 92 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes verse sounding more like common speech but using heightened rhetoric for specific purposes: rhesis,
monody, agon, stychomythia are the major forms. These make up the formal elements of tragedy.
Here in this unit details of Aristotle’s tragedy and its application on Macbeth has been given. Poetic
tragedy and motifs have also been described in this unit.
6.1 Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy and its Application on Macbeth

Macbeth is an anomaly among Shakespeare’s tragedies in certain critical ways. It is short: more
than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear, and only slightly more than half as long
as Hamlet. This brevity has suggested to many critics that the received version is based on a heavily
cut source, perhaps a prompt-book for a particular performance. That brevity has also been connected
to other unusual features: the fast pace of the first act, which has seemed to be “stripped for action”;
the comparative flatness of the characters other than Macbeth; the oddness of Macbeth himself
compared with other Shakespearean tragic heroes.

6.1.1 Tragedy of Character

At least since the days of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, analysis of the play has centred on
the question of Macbeth’s ambition, commonly seen as so dominant a trait that it defines the character.
Johnson asserted that Macbeth, though esteemed for his military bravery, is wholly reviled. This
opinion recurs in critical literature, and, according to Caroline Spurgeon, is supported by Shakespeare
himself, who apparently intended to degrade his hero by vesting him with clothes unsuited to him
and to make Macbeth look ridiculous by several nimisms he applies: His garments seem either too
big or too small for him—as his ambition is too big and his character too small for his new and
unrightful role as king. When he feels as if “dressed in borrowed clothes”, after his new title as
Thane of Cawdor, prophesied by the witches, has been confirmed by Rosse, Banquo comments:
“New honours come upon him,/Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould,/But with
the aid of use.” And, at the end, when the tyrant is at bay at Dunsinane, Caithness sees him as a man
trying in vain to fasten a large garment on him with too small a belt: “He cannot buckle his
distemper’d cause/Within the belt of rule,” while Angus, in a similar nimism, sums up what
everybody thinks ever since Macbeth’s accession to power: “now does he feel his title/Hang loose
about him, like a giant’s robe/upon a dwarfish thief.”
Like Richard III, but without that character’s perversely appealing exuberance, Macbeth wades through
blood until his inevitable fall. As Kenneth Muir writes, “Macbeth has not a predisposition to murder;
he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to
achieve the crown.” Some critics, such as E. E. Stoll, explain this characterisation as a holdover from
Senecan or medieval tradition. Shakespeare’s audience, in this view, expected villains to be wholly
bad, and Senecan style, far from prohibiting a villainous protagonist, all but demanded it.
Yet for other critics, it has not been so easy to resolve the question of Macbeth’s motivation. Robert
Bridges, for instance, perceived a paradox: a character able to express such convincing horror before
Duncan’s murder would likely be incapable of committing the crime.

For many critics, Macbeth’s motivations in the first act appear vague and insufficient.
John Dover Wilson hypothesised that Shakespeare’s original text had an extra scene or scenes
where husband and wife discussed their plans. This interpretation is not fully provable;
however, the motivating role of ambition for Macbeth is universally recognised. The evil
actions motivated by his ambition seem to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil, as Macbeth
himself recognises: “I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning
were as tedious as go o’er.”

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