ABSTRACT
Less discussion has been devoted to character and motive in twentieth-century criticism of Macbeth than in criticism of any of the other major tragedies. The fullest discussion of character occurs in Marvin Rosenberg's The Masks of Macbeth (1978), and one of the most striking things about his account is how much more actors, actresses, and directors have contributed to our understanding of the principals than have literary critics. A number of critics have pointed to the fact that our first image of Macbeth is that of a bloody man, and they see this as a foreshadowing of his later violence. Macbeth has a powerful need to be great but an even more powerful need to be good. Macbeth's fears are, in part, reality based, but his sense of the inevitability of is greatly intensified by his perfectionistic bargain. Macbeth has many fantasies about the horrors of regicide but few about the glories of kingship.
