The Tragedy of Fear

Shakespeare: Macbeth

In this course Dr Fred Parker (University of Cambridge) explores Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the first lecture we think about Macbeth not as a tragedy as ambition, as it is commonly described, but as a tragedy of fear. After that, in the second lecture, we think about the character of Macbeth in terms of manhood and childhood, before turning in the third lecture to consider the marriage of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, with its unusual combination – after the murder of Duncan, at least – of tenderness and terror. In the fourth lecture, we think about the overall structure of the play as a movement from the mental, fantastical world of the Macbeths to the external, real world of everybody else, before turning in the fifth and final lecture to consider how Macbeth thinks about time.

The Tragedy of Fear

In this lecture we think about Macbeth not as a tragedy of ambition, as it is commonly described, but as a tragedy of fear, focusing in particular on: (i) the idea that Macbeth does what he does not because of ambition but because of fear; (ii) the imagery of fear and (especially) nightmares throughout the play (e.g. ‘These terrible dreams that shake us nightly’, 3.2.19-20); (iii) the idea in Macbeth that fantasies and figments of one’s imagination can have a real effect in the physical world; (iv) the difficulty with which the social order contains the ultra-violence meted out by Macbeth, Banquo and others in the play; the idea that the social order is on the edge of collapsing into anarchy; (v) England’s recent brush with anarchy just weeks or months before Macbeth: the Gunpowder Plot; (vi) the equivocation of good and evil (e.g. ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’, 1.1.9) in a play where the moral issues seem completely unequivocal; and (vii) the question of why Macbeth kills Duncan despite his horror at the thought of doing so.