ABSTRACT
The scarcely noted fact that the debate for and against historicism—encouraged by Hegel, Lukács, Strauss, Aron or Popper—tends to capitalize on the hermeneutic affordances of a play like Macbeth, brings the historical (perhaps historicist) provocation of the play all the more sharply into focus. Self-validating prophecy emerges, in this reconsideration, as the pivotal, para-logic, speech act in a play that reads like a parody of verification. By exposing the logical complicity between providentialist prophecy and historicist interpretation, this essay contends that Shakespeare obtained, in Macbeth , ironic-critical distance from contemporary historiographic teleology, and that he thus sheltered himself in advance from the moralist-apocalyptic arrogance of neo-historicist critics like Greenblatt or Richard Wilson.
