Macbeth (Vol. 80) | Julian Markels (essay date summer 1961)
Julian Markels (essay date summer 1961)
SOURCE: Markels, Julian. “The Spectacle of Deterioration: Macbeth and the ‘Manner’ of Tragic Imitation.” Shakespeare Quarterly 12, no. 3 (summer 1961): 293-303.
[In the following essay, Markels reads Macbeth as a tragedy of personal degeneration, concentrating on Macbeth as a tragic figure according to the classical, Aristotelian definition and examining his potential to elicit sympathy and find redemption.]
Nor, on the other hand, should an extremely bad man be seen falling from happiness into misery. Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity or fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves. … There remains, than, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not preeminently virtuous and just. …
Aristotle, Poetics.
Macbeth, as a...
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