ABSTRACT
Does Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a seventeenth-century play depicting events in eleventh-century Scotland, have anything significant to tell the twenty-first century about political corruption? Traditional interpretations argue that the play is more a study of the psychology of evil than an examination of the ills of a political system. In 1930, G. Wilson Knight described the play as “Shakespeare’s most profound and mature vision of Evil.”1 More recently, David Bevington argued that in Macbeth, “a tradition of moral and religious drama has been transformed into an intensely human study of the psychological effects of evil on a particular man.”2 Susan Snyder notes that by altering his sources to eliminate Duncan’s weaknesses as a king while excluding Banquo and other coconspirators from participation in his murder, Shakespeare creates “a stark black-white moral opposition” while concentrating “on private, purely moral issues uncomplicated by the gray shades of political expediency.”3 Blair Worden similarly concludes that “Shakespeare gives little time to the machinery of politics or the workings of constitutions. His interest is in the psychological rather than the institutional basis of politics.”4
