"Modern Ecstasy": Macbeth and the Meaning of the Political

This essay reads William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth as an interrogation of the meaning of the political in early seventeenth-century England. Resisting the dominant tendency to interpret the play's politics in terms of its particular and local contextual enmeshments, I approach Macbeth as a play fundamentally preoccupied with the problem of political action in a period when individual praxis was becoming increasingly troubled by the emergence of the centralized state.