6 - The Work Reworked

Summary

Shakespeare's creative work in adapting the images and structures of the history plays into the psychic and emotional experience of Macbeth shows his developing skill as a dramatist, converting narrative and history into characters whose poetic articulation of their dramatic situation offers potential for an audience's empathetic engagement. He used these recurring motifs to create structures of feeling that articulated and, in a sense created, the terms with which to deal with extreme states of emotion. Our modern sense of the traumatic consequences of evil actions in psychic breakdown, suicide and self-destruction is in part enabled by Shakespeare's achievement in placing the political and ethical frameworks of judgement in tension with emotion and empathy. This tension between judgement and empathy, together with a concern to find a definable significance for the play's meaning in its historical frame, has been at the heart of subsequent treatment of the play and has generated the terms of its reception in both the theatre and in criticism.

The achievement involved in creating those complex literary and dramatic effects has, for the most part, been attributed to the creative artistry of the writer. Whether flattering the king, or engaging in a ‘collective ritual of reassurance', or even reworking his own earlier style, the writer is usually presented as co-extensive with the work - and in some cases the one substitutes for the other: ‘Shakespeare’ means both the writer and his work.

This view of Shakespeare as a god-like figure who created a world from nothing has inevitably been resisted. From the midtwentieth century, literary theorists questioned the idea of an author as the sole source of artistic effect or the work of art as the seamless creation of a single mind. In the case of Shakespeare, that critical tendency against the romantic view of authorship was linked with a view that insisted on Shakespeare's role as a man of the theatre, a sharer in a playing company, an actor and entrepreneur who was alert to the commercial implications of his work and wrote in collaboration with others.