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"Modern Ecstasy": Macbeth and the Meaning of the Political
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 79, Number 4, Winter 2012
- pp. 823-849
- 10.1353/elh.2012.0030
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
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.