It is often said that Shakespeare’s greatest achievement was the four great tragedies of his middle years: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The last of the four, Macbeth, is also the shortest and most intense of them.
The play is full of enigmas. Macbeth himself, the protagonist, is a profoundly wicked man. Yet he is also a profoundly sympathetic one. He is deeply ambitious, but knows that the fulfilment of his ambition will destroy everything that makes his life worthwhile – his honour, his reputation, the love he is held in, his relationship with his wife. That relationship is perhaps the most fascinating feature of the play. Few literary artists have succeeded in representing a marriage as close and intimate as that between the Macbeths: an apparently childless love that gives birth to evil, then falls apart before our eyes as the consequences of evil work themselves out.
We will attempt to solve these enigmas in class discussion, studying one act of the play per day, seeing thought leading to action and action to its consequences. We will read as if the outcome were unknown to us, trying not to anticipate too much as we go on.
For illustration, we shall watch extracts from a film of the famous stage production of 1978 with Ian McKellen as Macbeth and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth.
One further point: the actors who played those leading parts in 1606 were probably the same actors who, the following year and on the same London stage, played Antony and Cleopatra. Both pairs, of course, are couples in middle age. A good complement to this course is Rb3, Antony and Cleopatra: a Roman thought about Egypt. In both courses the two plays may briefly be compared.
