Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Sheldon P. Zitner

Critical Essay by Sheldon P. Zitner

SOURCE: Zitner, Sheldon P. “Macbeth and the Moral Scale of Tragedy.” Journal of General Education 16, no. 1 (April 1964): 20-8.

In the following essay, Zitner comments on Shakespeare's ability to present the numerous evil acts perpetrated by Macbeth without letting his tragedy degrade to the level of melodrama.

The nemesis of tragic drama is not comedy—which also rests on a doubt of human powers—but melodrama. Melodrama reduces our sinful excellence to an unmixed, therefore untestable and unalterable, criminality or virtue. And its “happy” outcome arouses, not fear or pity—which comedy parries only with lucky blunders—but recklessness and self-approval, for melodrama assumes that men can act wholly outside evil, and so triumph over it without a self-defeat. Melodrama is what happens when tragic writing tires of common humanity.

The “story” of Macbeth conspicuously invites such a fatigue. Its murders are gross and frequent, and, though realized or alluded to in...
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