8 - The Abstract Work

Summary

By the beginning of the twentieth century Macbeth had been reformed by the work of critics and performers. In its high cultural version, it offered an account of two extraordinary people whose eloquent response to the deadly actions they had chosen provided a unique insight into the ethical and psychic workings of the human spirit. That insight could be traced back to particular speeches and episodes in the text of the play. The passages dealing with Macbeth's physical experience of fear and dread (see above 88), the physical effects of his regret in sleeplessness and paranoia and Lady Macbeth's sleep walking scene became paradigms for the ethical sensibility that was the mark of Shakespeare's genius. The continuing appeal of this ethical take on the work arose because it recreated and eloquently articulated eighteenth-century views about the nature of ethical sensibility. It was also a result of the way that the experience of the play had entered the cultural awareness of the population. As William St Clair has explained, the great folio collected editions of Shakespeare were too expensive to achieve a wide readership and pirate publishers had attempted to break into the market with collections and anthologies of poetry that they could claim were not covered by universal copyright.1 The copyright publishers responded with their own anthologies of ‘Beauties’ that built on the practice in early editions of identifying with quotation-marks passages that the editor felt were particularly fine. The anthologies glossed the passages with abstractions - Love, fear, death etc - and often arranged them in illustrative groups. The knowledge of the play, especially for those who did not buy it in expensive folio editions or did not live within reach of notable productions, was thus transformed into memorable lines. Poetic abstraction became meaning, the play became a palimpset of significance whether it was being re-edited or reproduced in the theatre. Macbeth, like other early-modern plays and poetry, became known by its ‘beauties'. The eloquent statement of commonplaces - such as Macbeth's hysterical disquisition on sleep in 2.4. - were removed from their dramatic contexts so that their poetic truths came to seem self-evident, not least because of their familiarity.