The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

Roy Walker has followed up his full-length study of Hamlet, noticed in the last number of Shakespeare Survey, with a similar study of Macbeth. His method is essentially imaginative, the full significance of the tragic pattern revealing itself through a pondering of the processes of free association which one or another poetic image sets in motion. The hazards are obvious, and the book comes to a good many conclusions with which few will agree: for example, that the problematical Third Murderer is a “dramatic personification of Macbeth’s guilt”, and that Hecate (put into the play by Shakespeare himself, but without a speaking part) is correspondingly the guilty spirit of Lady Macbeth. But Walker tells us that although he fully expects to be assailed on particular judgements, he nevertheless believes that his “method of interpretation is genuinely in communication with Shakespeare’s creative activity”; and that it is, moreover, “somewhat akin to an X-ray examination, in which the normal surfaces are rendered transparent and almost invisible so that the inner structure may be observed and knowledge of the organism and its functioning increased”. This bold claim is justified. Walker combines an ability to view the play as a whole, ranging swiftly and sensitively over its whole surface and through its various depths, with an answering ability never to lose contact with its serial nature, its weight and impact as action.