Editing Macbeth (section)

===As a tragedy of character===
At least since the days of [[Samuel Johnson]], analysis of the play has centred on the question of Macbeth's ambition, commonly seen as so dominant a trait that it defines the character.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Whalen |first=Richard F. |date=2014 |title=What Happens in Macbeth: An Originalist Reading of the Play |url=https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/Whalen.Originalist.Macbeth.pdf |journal=Brief Chronicles V  |pages=61–68}}</ref> Johnson asserted that Macbeth, though esteemed for his military bravery, is wholly reviled.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Sherbo |first=Arthur |date=1951 |title=Dr. Johnson on Macbeth: 1745 and 1765 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/511908 |journal=The Review of English Studies |volume=2 |issue=5 |pages=40–47 |doi=10.1093/res/II.5.40 |jstor=511908 |issn=0034-6551}}</ref>

This opinion recurs in critical literature, and, according to [[Caroline Spurgeon]], is supported by Shakespeare himself, who apparently intended to degrade his hero by vesting him with clothes unsuited to him and to make Macbeth look ridiculous by several exaggerations he applies: his garments seem either too big or too small for him&nbsp;– as his ambition is too big and his character too small for his new and unrightful role as king. After Macbeth is unexpectedly greeted with his new title as Thane of Cawdor as prophesied by the witches, Banquo comments:

{{Poem quote|New honours come upon him,
Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould,
But with the aid of use|I, 3, ll. 145–146}}

And, at the end, when the tyrant is at bay at Dunsinane, Caithness sees him as a man trying in vain to fasten a large garment on him with too small a belt:

{{Poem quote|He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause
Within the belt of rule|V, 2, ll. 14–15}}

while Angus sums up what everybody thinks ever since Macbeth's accession to power:

{{Poem quote|now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
upon a dwarfish thief|V, 2, ll. 18–20).{{sfn|Spurgeon|1935|pp=324–327}}}}

Like [[Richard III (play)|Richard III]], but without that character's perversely appealing exuberance, Macbeth wades through blood until his inevitable fall. As Kenneth Muir writes, "Macbeth has not a predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown."{{Sfn|Muir|1984|p=xlviii}} Some critics, such as E. E. Stoll, explain this characterisation as a holdover from Senecan or medieval tradition. Shakespeare's audience, in this view, expected villains to be wholly bad, and Senecan style, far from prohibiting a villainous protagonist, all but demanded it.{{sfn|Stoll|1943|p=26}}<!-- Stoll doesn't make this connection explicit: he discusses Macbeth as a tragic hero that commits villainous acts, and discusses Aristotelan (Senecan, in practice) primacy of plot over character (Stoll is responding to psychological readings), but doesn't, here, say that Shakespeare was writing to an audience expectation of a villainous protagonist. He makes that connection elsewhere though (From Shakespeare to Joyce, Shakespeare and Other Masters). -->

Yet for other critics, it has not been so easy to resolve the question of Macbeth's motivation. [[Robert Bridges]], for instance, perceived a paradox: a character able to express such convincing horror before Duncan's murder would likely be incapable of committing the crime.{{sfn|Muir|1984|p=xlvi}} For many critics, Macbeth's motivations in the first act appear vague and insufficient. [[John Dover Wilson]] hypothesised that Shakespeare's original text had an extra scene or scenes where husband and wife discussed their plans.{{citation needed|date=February 2018}} This interpretation is not fully provable; however, the motivating role of ambition for Macbeth is universally recognised. The evil actions motivated by his ambition seem to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil, as Macbeth himself recognises:

{{Poem quote|I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.|III, 4, ll. 165–167}}

While working on Russian translations of Shakespeare's works, [[Boris Pasternak]] compared Macbeth to [[Raskolnikov]], the protagonist of ''[[Crime and Punishment]]'' by [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]]. Pasternak argues that "neither Macbeth or Raskolnikov is a born criminal or a villain by nature. They are turned into criminals by faulty rationalizations, by deductions from false premises." He goes on to argue that Lady Macbeth is "feminine&nbsp;... one of those active, insistent wives" who becomes her husband's "executive, more resolute and consistent than he is himself". According to Pasternak, she is only helping Macbeth carry out his own wishes, to her own detriment.{{sfn|Pasternak|1959|pp=150–152}}