Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on July 19, 2008
Literary Imagination 2008 10(3):255-263; doi:10.1093/litimag/imn045
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Murderous Thinking in Macbeth
*William E. Cain, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
One of the unnerving fascinations of Macbeth is that from start to finish we are sympathetically connected to its protagonist, a serial killer. Macbeth "holds our imaginative sympathy," Cleanth Brooks has said, "even after he has degenerated into a bloody tyrant and has become the slayer of Macduff's wife and children."1 There is a "peculiar intimacy" between this murderer and the audience, notes John Bayley, a "feeling that we are closer to Macbeth than to any other character in Shakespeare."2 In part this is because Shakespeare dramatizes Macbeth's horror at the prospect of killing Duncan. Macbeth does not take to cruelty with the gleeful contempt of Richard III or the wicked delight of Edmund. Nor does he resemble Aaron and Iago, heartless incarnations of malice. Macbeth recoils from the sickening nature of the act even as he commits himself to it.
We would respond less sympathetically to Macbeth if we