Macbeth (Vol. 44) | Robert N. Watson (essay date 1984)
Robert N. Watson (essay date 1984)
SOURCE:'"Thriftless Ambition,'Foolish Wishes and the Tragedy of Macbeth," in Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 83-141.
[In the following excerpt, Watson supplements the traditional Freudian or oedipal interpretation of Macbeth by focusing on the symbolic aspects of the hero's ambition. In the critic's judgment, the murder of Duncan represents Macbeth's perverse attempt to establish a new identity through a ruinous disruption of the normal cycles of procreation and generation.]
Shakespeare portrays Macbeth's crimes, from first to last, as costly violations of the procreative cycle. Dr. Isadore Coriat, one of the play's first psychoanalytic critics, identifies the witches who instigate these offenses as "erotic symbols, representing, although sexless, the emblems of the generative power in nature. In the'hell broth'are condensed heterogeneous...
[The entire page is 4351 words long]
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