Brows of Grace, Nerves of Steel: Malcolm and Macbeth

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the legibility of a butcher's designs is succeeded by the monstrous virtue of his replacement Malcolm, who artfully confuses the social world's assumptions and habits, its ways of recognizing authority and punishing sin. I explore Malcolm's powers in terms of a new politics equally expert at manufacturing fear and imitating grace, with reference to witchcraft trials and to analogues provided by Rembrandt and Hobbes. I also consider theories about the workings of this new politics supplied by social scientists, concluding that Malcolm's strategies for unleashing evil and its remedy similarly sequester and obscure people from each other.