Macbeth: The self of evil.

Abstract

This article advances the thesis that Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, is best understood as a drama which centers on the alteration in the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Lord Macbeth, the hero of the realm, is revealed to be a man whose self required an archaic selfobject -Lady Macbeth -to maintain its cohesiveness. As the play unfolds and Lady Macbeth becomes fragmented, Macbeth experiences a profound disarray with tragic consequences for all in the kingdom, including wholesale murder and the killing of "innocent babes." Shakespeare's play is dominated from beginning to end by the vicissitudes of a failed self/selfobject relationship and the attempted repair of this relationship. I.Shakespeare's Macbeth, based on the Holinshed chronicle of the Scottish nobleman (Hosley, 1587(Hosley, /1968) is a play that speaks to many mysteries of life. It addresses the corrosive effect of evil on man within the framework of Shakespeare's myth of the evil woman, embodied both in Lady Macbeth and in the three Witches. In this article, I propound the thesis that the self-transformations of the two protagonists -Lord and Lady Macbethare at the center of the play. I believe that Shakespeare's ingenious transformation of the Holinshed account of Macbeth and his Lady urges a study of the relationship of these two protagonists at the beginning of the drama and its metamorphosis in the course of the play. Much of the dramatic action of the play centers on the alteration in the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. As Lady Macbeth's majesty diminishes, Macbeth experiences a profound disarray with tragic consequences