ABSTRACT
However much treason and sovereignty, Macbeth’s supernatural dagger and Duncan’s “golden blood” (2.3.110) might appear distinct in Macbeth, a generation of Shakespeare scholars have helped highlight the unsettling connections between these two categories of political philosophy. Challenging the emphasis on Macbeth as a royalist celebration of King James VI and I’s absolute sovereignty against the threat of treason-a reading carefully articulated by Alvin Kernan and Henry Paul-critics have drawn attention to the play’s “radically ambigious effects” or, as Stephen Mullaney writes, its “amphibology” (Coddon 485; Mullaney).1 This ambiguity appears most pointedly in the play’s political representations: even as it depicts the horrors of treason, the play offers a critique of sovereign power, at least as such power relies on treason and tyranny to establish and maintain its rule (Coddon; Mullaney). Indeed, rather than supporting sovereign power at any cost, the play legitimates tyrannicide as Malcolm and his allies unseat Macbeth. The play thus purports, as Alan Sinfield cogently argues, “to discriminate Macbeth’s violence from that legitimately deployed by the state” (101), but this distinction serves merely to justify tyrannicide in the name of the state. David Scott Kastan also illuminates the persistent connection of traitors to sovereigns in the play, evident in the doubling of Malcolm and Macbeth as monarchomachs: “the play both begins and ends with an attack upon established rule, with a loyal nobility rewarded with new titles, and with the execution of a rebellious thane of Cawdor” (174).
