SOURCE: “Consciousness and Responsibility in Macbeth,” in Mosaic, Vol. 15, No. 2, June, 1982, pp. 17-32.

In the following essay, Birenbaum studies the tragic consciousness—“the prolonged agony of awareness”—apparent in the moral decline of Macbeth.

Some central Shakespearean characters such as Cleopatra, Richard II and Macbeth all violate, emphatically, ethical suppositions usual in our culture. It therefore is easy enough for reader-spectators, when they think about the plays, to deplore the excesses of these wicked protagonists and to try to distinguish their greatness or their potentiality from their faults. Richard, for one, reveals at John of Gaunt's death a callous flippancy which repels and angers us. We are repelled properly, by dramatic strategy, but we need neither chastise Richard nor forgive him. We are being led, rather, a degree deeper into the tragic complex of emotion. We sense a grotesqueness in the way things are, as we come to...