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Essay: How The Doctrine Of Witchcraft and Macbeth’s Imagination Impacted The Emergence of the Individual

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  • Published: 23 March 2023*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
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  • Words: 980 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 4 (approx)
  • Tags: Macbeth essays

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Thus the doctrine of witchcraft was legally established (Woudhuysen, p.45, l.15ff.). In Macbeth it is also the witches and their prophecies, whose arbitrary interpretation is part of Macbeth’s imagination, that decisively contribute to tempting him to evilness and, therefore, get the ball of the plot rolling.
To begin with, this paper will demonstrate the historical background of the tragedy and the Elizabethan psychology, afterwards it will extensively explain the term and significance of Macbeth’s imagination and then touch upon essential characteristics as well as the nature and power of his imagination. Subsequently the dual time structure of the drama shall be pointed out and Macbeth’s imagination as an anticipation of the future as well as an expression of a disturbed psyche shall be made subject of discussion. Finally it will be analyzed whether the protagonist is rather a victim or an offender, or rather in how far one can talk of a rational perpetration in today’s sense at all.
2. The Emergence of the Individual in the Middle Ages

In order to be able to better stake out the intellectual innovations of humanism and Shakespeare in the following, the paper shall, at this point, shortly touch upon the gradual emergence of individualism in the Middle Ages, which especially manifested in personal descriptions within the historiography at that time, by means of Peter Abélard’s (1079-1142) presentation of his Historia Calamitatum.
For instance, in Abélard’s time only the height of a person was considered important for their description; if need be, one would even make up something fitting in a positive sense when it appeared desirable. Thereby, distinctive characteristics of the described person were still forewent. Concerning the general attributes, a great but rather prosaic depiction was preferred (see Vitz, p.432, l.36ff).
The ‘psychology’ of that time – or rather what was considered as such, e.g. the nature, the abilities, talents or wishes of the human – was not secularized yet, but conversely did not differ much from theology. And what primarily interested the theologists of the Middle Ages was not individualization, but divine salvation, damnation, exaltation and decay of the human soul or its hierarchic relationship to God. This fundamental orientation seems to have spread onto the entire medieval thinking concerning human personality and its development. Any psychological change was considered an elevation or degradation, a progress or retreat (Vitz, p.433, ll.20-29).
Only in the modern time people began to seriously show interest in what distinguishes one human from all the others, or rather what we call the ‘individual’ today, meaning the unusual, the diverse, the peculiar or the deviant (Vitz, p.434, l.6-9). In the Middle Ages the individual neither strives for perceiving new and different things, nor for voicing them – just as little as, for instance, differentiating between his own experience of pain and the martyrs’ (Vitz, p.438, l.30-31).

3. The Historical and Intellectual Background with Regard to Individuality

In contrast to the gradual emergence of individualism in the Middle Ages, the same reference shall now be made, and observed more precisely, for the Renaissance, the time of Shakespeare.
The humanism of the Renaissance is also described as the age of the individual, since it especially emphasized the dignity and value of the individual. The human, with all his feelings and perceptions, was now placed into the center of society and the cosmos, and in the course of this discovery of the individual, the individual personality progressively moved into the foreground (Unterstenhöfer, p.48, l.1-2).
However, the term ‘individual’ initially had a different meaning than it has today: “Individual […] referred to that which is one in substance or essence, indivisible, or that which is inseparable from a whole. It did not have the meaning now given to the word as signifying a sense of self-identity, for which the O.E.D. cites the first use in 1633.“ (Ferry, p.34, l.42ff.) This transition from “essence” to “self-identity” can, already in the beginning, be seen in Shakespeare’s depiction of Macbeth.
What rated as the perfect example of the ‘new type’ of human that emerged in the Renaissance, who was now understood as an individual with an own unique identity, was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whom the poet let express his innermost feelings and experiences on stage for the first time:

“The great symbol and epitome of this new state of being in the Renaissance is Hamlet. His consciousness of playing a part which is in some sense alien to his real self finds innumerable echoes in contemporary literature.“ (Delany, p.12, ll.2-6).

In this context it is also what accounts for Shakespeare’s greatness to, for the first time, bring the just mentioned “self-identity” onto the Elizabethan stage. Anne Ferry names further features that amount to Hamlet as an individual and that certainly can also be transferred to the, shortly thereafter created, character of Macbeth: “His opening aside, his first speech, his many soliloquys, his references to what is hidden in his heart all seem designed to present him as an individual aware of having what a modern writer would call an inner life or a real self.” (Ferry p.29, l.36-39).
Further intentions of humanism were the ‘burst’ of class- and national barriers as well as the gradual emancipation from the mental/spiritual limitations caused by an all too authoritarian value- and moral system of the church, or rather religion. This emancipation also included the concept of an individual identity.
From a traditionally conservative viewpoint of the Middle Ages concerning a now emancipating individualism, the church still denied the concept of the ‘individual’, since humans were not supposed to innerly see themselves as autonomous and rationally-thinking beings – which was perceived as revolutionary, maybe even seditious – but to act as obedient servants of God and the state who only define, or rather fulfill, themselves through the collective mass of devout Christians.

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