Macbeth (Vol. 44) | Arthur Kirsch (essay date 1984)
Arthur Kirsch (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "Macbeth's Suicide," in ELH, Vol. 51, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 269-96.
[In the essay below, Kirsch brings together Augustinian theology, Renaissance moral essays, and Freudian psychology to explore the nature of Macbeth's ambitious desires. He sees the hero's aspirations as both a sinful fantasy of god-like omnipotence and an expression of infantile narcissism, he also emphasizes the hollowness of Macbeth's quest, suggesting that this play is "the least redemptive and least heroic of Shakespeare's great tragedies."]
Macbeth is the most self-centered of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and not coincidentally, it seems to me, the one with the least amplitude of spirit. All of Shakespeare's great tragic figures are isolated in a universe essentially of their own imagination and thought, but in none of them is such isolation so inordinate and destructive an expression of egoism as it is in...
[The entire page is 11854 words long]
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