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Not surprisingly, Macbeth has received volumes of critical commentary over the years. Not only is the play an audience favorite, but its complex characterization, deeply woven themes, and characteristic Shakespearean style make it rich ground for scholarly inquiry. Critics such as Harold Bloom have remarked on the importance of Macbeth in the context of Shakespeare's works. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom writes, ''The rough magic in Macbeth is wholly Shakespeare's; he indulges his own imagination as never before, seeking to find its moral limits (if any).'' Bloom also remarks, ''Macbeth is an uncanny unity of setting, plot, and characters, fused together beyond comparison with any other play of Shakespeare's.'' Bloom is not alone in his admiration for this enduring play. In his article ''Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action'' for Shakespeare Quarterly, Irving Ribner states, ''Macbeth is a closely knit, unified construction, every element of which is designed to support an intellectual statement, to which action, character, and poetry all contribute.''

Critics continue to debate the characterization of Macbeth as a tragic hero. There is no consensus as to whether Macbeth is technically tragic or whether he is to be considered a hero. In drama, a tragedy traditionally recounts the significant events or actions in a protagonist's life which, taken together, bring about the catastrophe. Classical rules of tragedy also require that the hero's ruin evokes pity and fear in the audience. Some critics assert that since Macbeth's actions throughout the play are inherently evil, he gets what he deserves in the end and therefore his downfall is not catastrophic in a tragic sense. Critic Mary McCarthy takes the position that Macbeth is actually an average man who is easily duped by superstition and the will of others. In ''The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays,'' McCarthy describes Macbeth as gullible because he never question the witches' predictions.

Knowing that they are witches, he still does not consider that they may be trying to confuse and mislead him. She writes, ''Macbeth is not clever; he is taken in by surfaces, by appearance. He cannot think beyond the usual course of things.'' Although he is bold and takes initiative in battle, at home he is submissive to the will of his wife. This facet of his personality, however, compels other commentators to argue that his feelings of guilt, combined with the coercion of the witches and his wife, generate pity and fear among readers and spectators at his ruin, a feeling identified in classical tragedy as catharsis. In College English, J. Lyndon Shanley contributes an article titled, ''Macbeth: The Tragedy of Evil.'' In this essay, Shanley writes that Macbeth's downfall is caused by his decision to sin willingly and knowingly. He adds:

Macbeth is terrified by the warnings of his conscience, but he cannot surrender. That he acts with full knowledge of the evil only increases the pity and fear aroused by his deed. For this knowledge causes much of his suffering; it makes his condition far worse than it would have been had he acted with less than complete knowledge.

Shanley is not the only critic to find something sympathetic in Macbeth, despite his ruthless and violent ways. In his article ''Macbeth as Tragic Hero,'' Wayne C. Booth claims that Macbeth's failing was less about having deplorable character and moral fiber, and more about lack of perception. He maintains that Macbeth does not understand the external forces working so hard to manipulate him (namely, the witches and Lady Macbeth); he does not understand the distinction between killing on a battlefield and killing in civilian life; and ''he does not understand his own character--he does not know what will be the effects of the evil act on his own future happiness.''

Still, there is a difference between pitying a character and relating to him. Bloom maintains that readers and audience members have difficulty not relating to Macbeth. He answers the question of why this is so by explaining that Macbeth ''so dominates [Shakespeare's] play that we have nowhere else to turn.'' As evidence, he notes how, although she is a strong character, Lady Macbeth is onstage very little; and readers do not have the chance to get to know other characters, such as Duncan, Malcolm, Banquo, and Macduff very well.

Although the minor characters appear only briefly (usually because they are murdered) and their personas are not fully developed, readers and critics are drawn to them. Duncan, for example, is held up as an example of a good king in contrast to Macbeth's figure as a bad king. Van Doren remarks, ''Duncan was everything that Macbeth is not. We saw him briefly, but the brilliance of his contrast with the thane he trusted has kept his memory beautiful throughout a play whose every other feature has been hideous.'' Similarly, Lady Macduff and her son appear fleetingly, but their fate evokes the pity of the audience and rouses more indignation toward Macbeth.

A substantial body of criticism addresses Lady Macbeth. Her importance in the play and her position as a dominant woman in Western literature have prompted lengthy discussion and character evaluation. Ribner juxtaposes Lady Macbeth with Banquo in her role in Macbeth's psychological makeup. He maintains that while Banquo represents the part of Macbeth's divided nature that would ''accept nature and reject evil,'' Lady Macbeth represents the other side. Numerous critics believe that left to his own devices, Macbeth would not have murdered Duncan and set into motion the tragic events of the play. Shanley explains that Lady Macbeth ''could sway him because she understood him and loved him, and because he loved her and depended on her love and good thoughts of him.'' While most commentary centers on the sheer strength and determination of Lady Macbeth, there are critics who find her less powerful than she seems, and even less powerful than her husband. Mark van Doren in Shakespeare asserts:

When the crisis comes she will break sooner than her husband does, but her brittleness then will mean the same thing that her melodrama means now: she is a slighter person than Macbeth, has a poorer imagination, and holds in her mind less of that power which enables it to stand up under torture.

Aligned with Lady Macbeth are the witches, who are also female figures who seem in control of themselves and of Macbeth. He is easily manipulated by them, intellectually and emotionally. Critics often note that the witches and Lady Macbeth work in tandem (although not intentionally) to undo Macbeth. Commenting on the witches' influence on Macbeth's will, Bloom explains, ''Between what Macbeth imagines and what he does, there is only a temporal gap, in which he himself seems devoid of will. The Weird Sisters, Macbeth's Muses, take the place of that will.'' In her article '''Born of Woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,'' Janet Adelman describes the dual influence of the witches and Lady Macbeth. She writes, ''Lady Macbeth brings the witches' power home: they get the cosmic apparatus, she gets the psychic force.''

The themes in Macbeth, including evil, guilt and conscience, ambition, time, and the supernatural have garnered a great deal of critical attention. In his article for Shakespeare Quarterly, Ribner explores the theme of evil in depth. He boldly writes:

Macbeth is in many ways Shakespeare's maturest and most daring experiment in tragedy, for in this play he set himself to describe the operation of evil in all its manifestations: to define its very nature, to depict its seduction of man, and to show its effect upon all the planes of creation once it has been unleashed by one man's sinful moral choice.

Ribner applauds Shakespeare's use of blood imagery and darkness to reinforce his theme of evil, and he notes that Macbeth carries out evil in every aspect of his life. His personal relationships are destroyed by evil, as is his self-perception. An because he sought only the power of the crown and not the responsibilities, he invited evil into Scotland. Ribner explains, ''On the level of the state Macbeth unleashes the greatest evils of which Shakespeare's audience could conceive, tyranny, civil war, and an invading foreign army.''

One of the more subtle themes running through Macbeth is time. The introduction of prophecy and the rush to fulfill it makes time seem to Macbeth and his wife something that can be controlled and manipulated by temporal beings. They see in the present signs of the future, and they look to the past for the same reason. Perhaps because of its subtlety, scholars often find the theme of time extremely pervasive and influential. Bloom comments, ''What notoriously dominates this play, more than any other in Shakespeare, is time, time that is not the Christian mercy of eternity, but devouring time, death nihilistically regarded as finality.'' Tom F. Driver in The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama states plainly, ''Much as he would like, Macbeth cannot separate the present from the past and the future. By the act of murder he has made his own history, and the rest of the play is the account of the fulfillment of that history, ultimately self-defeating.''

Few playwrights have demonstrated the kind of enduring popularity as Shakespeare has. As for Macbeth, its relevance is still upheld by scholars, students, professors, readers, and audience members. To some, the play's relevance is topical. In The Penguin New Writing, contributor Stephen Spender points to Macbeth as an obvious choice when seeking Shakespearean drama relevant to today's world. He explains, for example, ''It is impossible to read the lines beginning, 'Our country sinks beneath the yoke; it weeps, it bleeds' [act 4, scene 3, lines 38-39], without thinking of half a dozen countries under the yoke of a tyrant.'' Although Spender's comment was made in 1941, the observation is equally true today. To others, Macbeth endures for its universal appeal to the human spirit, even at its darkest. As Bloom suggests, ''We are to journey inward to Macbeth's heart of darkness, and there we will find ourselves more truly and more strange, murderers in and of the spirit.'' Ribner suggests a more positive, if surprising, reading of Macbeth when he points out that Macbeth's ultimate downfall is the result of his own choices. He concludes, ''We may thus, viewing the play in its totality, see good, through divine grace, inevitably emerging from evil and triumphant at the play's end with a promise of rebirth.''

Bibliography:

1) Adelman, Janet, '''Born of Woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,'' in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, edited by Marjorie Gruber, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 90-121.

2) Bloom, Harold, ''Macbeth,'' in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, 1998, pp. 516-45.

3) Booth, Wayne C., ''Macbeth as Tragic Hero,'' in The Journal of General Education, Vol. 6, No. 1, October 1951, pp. 17-25.

4) Driver, Tom F., ''The Uses of Time: The Oedipus Tyrannus and Macbeth,'' in The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama, Columbia University Press, 1960, pp. 143-67.

5) McCarthy, Mary, ''General Macbeth,'' in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, pp. 3-14.

6) Ribner, Irving, ''Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action,'' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1959, pp. 147-59.

7) Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, 2nd Series, edited by Kenneth Muir, Arden Shakespeare, 1997.

8) Shanley, J. Lyndon, ''Macbeth: The Tragedy of Evil,'' in College English, Vol. 22, No. 5, February 1961, pp. 305-11.

9) Spender, Stephen, ''Books and the War--II,'' in The Penguin New Writing, No. 3, February 1941, pp. 115-26. Van Doren, Mark, ''Macbeth,'' in Shakespeare, Henry Holt & Company, 1939, pp. 252-66.

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