Chapter 3 - Baroque Aesthetics and Witches in Macbeth

Summary

The next chapter on Macbeth looks at how the play uses a Baroque, expressionist aesthetic to help define the empty world of power it depicts, and the ambiguities of the Baroque aesthetic form as defined by Walter Benjamin provide the setting for the faint glimmers of utopian thinking in the play. In this, the complicated figures called the Weird Sisters in the play’s text – but Witches in the paratextual stage directions and speech prefixes of the non-authorial Folio text – play a central role and get detailed examination. They are fundamentally ambiguous dramatic figures, showing conflicting traits as both the Three Fates of classical mythology and witches of medieval and early modern legend and belief-systems. Accordingly, they can be seen as either detached prophets merely predicting events, or co-agents of Macbeth’s crimes and failures. There are even utopian elements in their complex construction, especially if the songs Thomas Middleton inserted in the Folio text are taken into account. But the play remains a dark tragedy of the emptiness and cruelty of the politics of force, its hints at utopian alternatives muted and subordinated to the predominant bleak and troubling qualities of a world dominated by force and power.