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| Publisher's Hardcover ©2019 | -- |
The venerable and prolific literary scholar completes his Shakespeare's Personalities series with a lingering and deeply curious, even troubled, look at the titular character in the legendary play.Having previously presented brief volumes on Iago, Lear, Cleopatra, and Falstaff, Bloom (Humanities/Yale Univ.) walks us through Macbeth, quoting lengthy passages from the text to illuminate his points. Throughout, the author muses on Macbeth's "proleptic and prophetic imagination" and wonders—all the way to the final paragraph—what it is about this sanguinary, murderous character that so deeply appeals to audiences. For example, Bloom lingers on the grim and grotesque Macbeth-ordered murder of Macduff's wife, son, servants. Although Bloom condemns these events (more than once and unequivocally: "his greatest iniquity"), he also notes that, somehow, we still feel something of a loss when Macduff, later, carries Macbeth's severed head onto the stage for us to see. Although Bloom's interpretations are invariably sound and based on a lifetime of reading and teaching the play, there are times when he ventures near the border of the plausible. He suggests, for example, that it's possible the Macbeths have no children because Macbeth suffers from premature ejaculations. The author also devotes attention to Lady Macbeth, at one point calling her a "fierce virago" who "touches her limit at parricide." Bloom ends with some tributes to the power of Shakespeare's language and imagination. "Shakespeare's bounty, like his Juliet's, is as boundless as the sea. The more you take, the more he has, for his invention and his love for his characters are alike infinite….For all his negativity, Macbeth's vitality survives in our hearts....absorbing him heightens of sense of being."Older readers may wish this clear, concise, empathetic volume were available when they were in school.
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)Acclaimed critic Bloom (
Bloom (Yale Univ.; The Anxiety of Influence ; The Western Canon ) has had a long and distinguished career as teacher and scholar. Nearing 88, he continues his prodigious publishing output with this fifth volume in his new series, "Shakespeare Personalities"; previous entries have dealt with William Shakespeare's Falstaff, Cleopatra, King Lear, and Iago. Although the titles suggest a focus on one character, these volumes amount to an annotated text of the play(s) in which the character appears. Throughout, Bloom offers a running commentary, ranging from a single sentence to over a page in length, including theatrical reminiscences, plot summary, paraphrase, historical background, personal reaction, and explication that spans from the insightful to the questionable, as when he says Lady Macbeth has poisoned (rather than drugged) the wine of Duncan's grooms, or glosses "roast your goose" as having sex with a prostitute (rather than "heat your smoothing iron"). Bloom offers no thesis and presents no extended argument about Macbeth , though through his reflections on various passages an idea of the characters emerges. He notes, for example, Macbeth's anticipating "feeling all actions before they are formulated." VERDICT This book is like a curate's egg, with some good places. For larger collections and Shakespeare completists. Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
School Library Journal (Fri Dec 01 00:00:00 CST 2017)
CHAPTER 1
And Nothing Is, but What Is Not
Nietzsche asserts, in The Dawn of Day, that "whoever thinks that Shakespeare's theatre has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error. . . . He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image, with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this is precisely the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy."
Shakespeare's cognitive powers are invested more abundantly in Hamlet than in any other personality, be it Falstaff, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Prospero. His proleptic and prophetic imagination possesses Macbeth, to a degree unmatched by anyone else in the dramas. Macbeth cannot keep up with his own intimations of the night world. No sooner does he envision an action than he leaps into futurity and gazes back at his initial impulse. Macbeth is a weird, an involuntary soothsayer. The Weird Sisters inevitably await him, knowing that he is, in part, their kin.
Readers quite possibly will recognize that they have elements in their imagination that are intensified in Macbeth. I think that many of us fear that we have acted on our darkest impulses before we have fully apprehended them. There is something preternatural in Macbeth. He alone in his drama is in touch with the night world of Hecate and the Weird Sisters. I will soon be eighty-eight and find myself sometimes seeing and hearing things that are not there. This does not cause alarm because it stays on the border of actual hallucinations. But Macbeth has gone across that border. For him nothing is but what is not.
The play begins with the witches entering with thunder and lightning. We see them only briefly. They chant in riddles that are antithetical:
When the battle's lost and won.
act 1, scene 1, line 4
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
act 1, scene 1, line 9
Our first account of Macbeth conveys his astonishing ferocity:
For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like Valour's minion, carved out his passage,
Till he faced the slave,
Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th' chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.
act 1, scene 2, lines 16-23
Slicing your opponent open from crotch to jaw is characteristic of Macbeth, who is described as the husband of the war goddess, or "Bellona's bridegroom." After Duncan, the Scottish king, adds the title of Thane of Cawdor to Macbeth's honors, we return to the three Witches. They accost Macbeth and his fellow captain Banquo:
Macbeth: So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
Banquo: How far is't call'd to Forres? What are these,
So withered and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th'inhabitants o'th' earth,
And yet are on't? Live you, or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips. You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.
Macbeth: Speak if you can: what are you?
1 Witch: All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis.
2 Witch: All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.
3 Witch: All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter.
Banquo: Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?--I'th' name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show? My noble partner
You greet with present grace, and great prediction
Of noble having and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal. To me you speak not.
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow, and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favors nor your hate.
1 Witch: Hail.
2 Witch: Hail.
3 Witch: Hail.
1 Witch: Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.
2 Witch: Not so happy, yet much happier.
3 Witch: Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none:
So all hail, Macbeth, and Banquo.
1 Witch: Banquo, and Macbeth, all hail.
Macbeth: Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more.
By Finel's death, I know I am Thane of Glamis,
But how of Cawdor? The Thane of Cawdor lives
A prosperous gentleman: and to be king
Stands not within the prospect of belief,
No more than to be Cawdor. Say from whence
You owe this strange intelligence, or why
Upon this blasted heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you.
Witches vanish.
act 1, scene 3, lines 38-78
Macbeth was played before King James I, who began as King James VI of Scotland. By tradition, James I was descended from Banquo. In Shakespeare's sources, Banquo was as guilty as Macbeth, but here he is stalwart and heroic. Finel was Macbeth's father, while Banquo and Macbeth do not yet know of Cawdor's treachery. An extraordinary aside marks the advent of Macbeth's proleptic imagination:
Macbeth: [aside] Two truths are told
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.--I thank you, gentlemen.--
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man
That function is smothered in surmise,
And nothing is, but what is not.
act 1, scene 3, lines 129-44
The tormented grammar partly suggests Macbeth's psychic turmoil. His murderous thought, though still a fantasy, so agitates his unaided state of man that function, or potential action, is smothered in surmise, or censored by imagination.
The motto of Macbeth, both play and person, could well be: "And nothing is, but what is not." "Nothing" is used sixteen times in Macbeth. It is startling for me to realize that those sixteen occurrences are outweighed by thirty-four in King Lear, thirty-one in Hamlet, and twenty-six in Othello. But then, Macbeth is a ruthlessly economical tragedy of just over two thousand lines. The prominence of "nothing" in it is as salient as is the undersong of nothingness in the other three great tragedies of blood.
Excerpted from Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
From the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, comes a portrait of Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare’s most complex and compelling anti-heroes—the final volume in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Lear, Iago, Macbeth.
From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.
Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.