SOURCE: Markels, Julian. “The Spectacle of Deterioration: Macbeth and the ‘Manner’ of Tragic Imitation.” Shakespeare Quarterly 12, no. 3 (summer 1961): 293-303.

In the following essay, Markels reads Macbeth as a tragedy of personal degeneration, concentrating on Macbeth as a tragic figure according to the classical, Aristotelian definition and examining his potential to elicit sympathy and find redemption.

Nor, on the other hand, should an extremely bad man be seen falling from happiness into misery. Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity or fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves. … There remains, than, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not preeminently virtuous and just. …

Aristotle, Poetics.

Macbeth, as a tragic hero, is a man with a capacity, one might almost say a taste, for damnation. This capacity … is not so...