Macbeth (Vol. 57) | Robert L. Reid (essay date 1991)
Robert L. Reid (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: “Macbeth's Three Murders: Shakespearean Psychology and Tragic Form,” in Renaissance Papers 1991, edited by George Walton Williams and Barbara J. Baines, The Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1992, pp. 75-92.
[In the following essay, originally delivered in 1991, Reid contends that the three murders committed by Macbeth are representative of the three distinctive stages of evil that evolve in his psyche.]
Macbeth is a milestone in man's exploration of … this “depth of things” which our age calls the unconscious.
Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
Interpreters of Macbeth have focused almost exclusively on the first murder, the killing of a king in Acts I-II, as the basis for understanding the play—its social, psychological, and metaphysical meanings. Macbeth's subsequent two assassinations, of Banquo in Act III, and...
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