4 - The Work in History

Summary

I have been suggesting that the 1623 text of Macbeth, read as a ‘work', presents a story that is driven by suspense, that takes place in a social world extending beyond what is shown on stage and that creates characters whose contemplation of actions and their consequences raises complex ethical and psychic considerations. The text's figurative language, moreover, reinforces that narrative with patterns of recurring images that resonate with the physical images from the text's implied stage pictures. This match between the forward movement of the action and the local effects of scenes and poetry creates an aesthetically satisfying coherence that combines an exciting story with a sense of dealing with important ideas.

Such an account of the work, of course, depends upon the protocols of formalist literary criticism that were developed in the mid-twentieth century precisely to insist upon the integrity of works of literature. Practitioners of this critical method, the so-called New Critics, sought to show that the artistic effects of literary works were generated by their internal structure and could be understood and appreciated entirely in their own terms. Works of literature could thus take their place alongside works of plastic art and could share an aesthetic of form where symmetry and coherence were the most valued aspects of artistic effect.

One important impulse behind New Criticism was a desire to rescue works of literature from the hands of pedants and philologists who sought to tie the meaning of literary works to arcane and specialized knowledge. In doing so they also rescued the literary work from its particular history. Like the artefacts in a museum, the work could be smoothed and polished by a critical process that emphasized its poetic coherence, relegating its connections to history to the footnotes.

As we have seen, the historical original of Macbeth was itself the product of a publishing process that created a literary version of the work, connected to but in no sense constrained by its prior existence as a play. No other text of the play exists, so the work of the 1623 Folio seems to provide a firm basis for the formalist reading that it both invites and rewards.