Eighteenth-Century Macbeths : the English Poet and the Scottish Play

Rogers, Rebecca (1999) Eighteenth-Century Macbeths : the English Poet and the Scottish Play. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

Our received wisdom about Macbeth originated with the cultural institutions of the eighteenth century: the theatre, literary criticism, parody and visual art. By exploring the play's afterlife - with especial focus on Scottish nationalism, parodic reappropriations and the representation of the witches - this study explores how Macbeth was reinvented as a play about characterisation and morality, just as Shakespeare was invented as a moral sage and the National Poet for a Britain asserting its national cultural identity.

Macbeth did not circulate in eighteenth-century culture as a discrete entity. Rather, commercial and cultural strategies combine to fragment the play into bit-parts, which were then reproduced until they achieved an extraordinary cultural visibility and became amenable to reappropriation. The process is exemplified by anthologies of Shakespearean Beauties, which reprinted quotations as edifying poetic aphorisms divorced from their narrative context. These well known Beauties then became objects of criticism and definitive moments in theatrical productions, and were reappropriated by political satirists and visual artists. In the early nineteenth century, as national self-confidence was reflected in the consolidation of Shakespeare's cultural status, the Works were packaged and marketed in a new way. A new identikit version of the plays entered popular circulation, and the importance of narrative superseded the quotability of Beauties.

This thesis avoids the homogenising effect of a broad-brush cultural history by using just one play as a barometer of the dramatist's changing social functions in a limited time frame. It examines how 'Shakespeare' was used to negotiate the public sphere, but in the process revealed the fractures and fissures in it, including the public sphere's constant mediation by commerce.

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