ABSTRACT
We have seen that Faustus sins bravely, but that his sinning is in part a superficial affair. And Hamlet magnifies sin but hardly enjoys it, although we perversely enjoy his misery. But surely the character who sins most bravely and terribly in all drama is Macbeth, or Macbeth and his ‘fiend-like queen’ (5.7.99). 1 Macbeth is an essay in the horrible excitement of sin, with the murder of Duncan in his bed standing in place of erotic consummation in the Macbeth marriage. Like Faustus, Macbeth is hollowed out by his demonic behaviour and life becomes for him quite empty. But at the same time Macbeth’s sin remains a sort of supercharged moment of negativity which exceeds all forms of ordinary existence, and certainly goes well beyond Faustus’s moment of lust with an illusory Helen, becoming its own kind of perverse apotheosis. Macbeth is the icon of an abortive Protestantism. Here its transitional phase of self-abandonment to sin and the Devil becomes truly an end in itself. The character who, pace Kierkegaard’s advocacy of Richard III, seems to me Shakespeare’s most demonic figure gathers to himself all the terrible truth of our ‘black and deep desires’ and sinfully degraded condition (1.4.52). In this he is a spiritual hero. But he does so without any hint or possibility of redemption. Macbeth gives a grim image of a world where demonic negation is the most compelling and even ultimate thing.
