“All That May Become a Man”: Macbeth and the Breakdown of the Heroic Model

Abstract

While initially appearing to conform to the traditional epic representation of war as a duel between Good and Evil, or Right and Wrong, Macbeth — a couple of centuries before a similar debunking takes place in the novel — ends up deconstructing this neat, unrealistic model and suggesting that all war is chaos and that ancient, inherited values such as heroism and honour are not sufficient to preserve communities from falling into confusion and destruction. DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-25 Bibliography Shakespeare, William. 1997 [1605-1606]. Macbeth . A. R. Braunmuller ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2005 [1598-1599]. King Henry V . A. Gurr ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968 [1965]. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolski. Cambridge (Mass.): M.I.T. Press. Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control (Vol. I) Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language . London-Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Braunmuller, A. R. 1997. Introduction to Macbeth . A. R. Braunmuller ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-93. Brogan, T.V.F. & A.W. Halsall. 2012. Antithesis. Roland Greene et al. eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 58-59. Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe . London: Temple Smith. Clark, Stuart. 1977. King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft & Kingship. Sydney Anglo ed. The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 156-181. Clark, Stuart. 1980. Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft. Past & Present , 87: 98-127. Clausewitz, Carl von. 1873 [1832]. On War . Trans. J. J. Graham. London: N. Trubner, www.clausewitz.com/.../OnWar1873/TOC.htm (accessed 28/5/2015). Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France . Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eco, Umberto, 1977. How Culture Conditions the Colours We See. Marshall Blonsky ed. On Signs . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 157-175. Folena, Lucia. 2013. Il ritorno di Cerere: la signora Ramsay e la guerra-caos. Lucia Folena ed. La guerra e le armi nella letteratura in inglese del Novecento . Torino: Trauben, 153-176. Hobbes, Thomas. 1962 [1651]. Leviathan . M. Oakeshott ed. New York-London: Collier Macmillan. Jakobson, Roman. 1990 [1956]. Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances. R. Jakobson, On Language , ed. Linda R. Waugh & Monique Monville- Burston. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 115-133. James I. 1682 [1598]. Basilikon Doron: Or, King James ’ s Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince . London: printed by M. Flesher for J. Hindmarsh. James I. 1924 [1597]. Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue . London: Bodley Head. Hill, Christopher, 1991 [1972]. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution . London: Penguin. Hodge, Robert, 2016. Ideology. The Semiotics Encyclopedia Online , http://www.semioticon.com/seo/I/ideology.html# , (accessed on 15/2/2016). Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. 1966. Les paysans du Languedoc . 2 vols. Paris: SEVPEN. Norbrook, David. 1987. Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography. Kevin Sharpe & Steven Zwicker eds. Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England . Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 78-116. Parsons, Terence. 2012. The Traditional Square of Opposition. Edward N. Zalta ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/square/#AriForOFor (accessed 1/02/2016). Riebling, Barbara. 1991. Virtue’s Sacrifice: A Machiavellian Reading of Macbeth . Studies in English Literature , 1500-1900, 31, 2: 273-286. Scurati, Antonio. 2007 [2003]. Guerra. Narrazioni e culture nella tradizione occidentale . Roma: Donzelli. Stallybrass, Peter. 1981. Macbeth and Witchcraft . J. R. Brown ed. Focus on “ Macbeth ”. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 189-209. Stallybrass, Peter & Allon White. 1986. The Politics & Poetics of Transgression . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.