“Macbeth’s Thick Night and the Political Ecology of a Dark Scotland.”
ResearchPaper
EnglishJeffrey B. Griswold
This article complicates scholarship on Macbeth that understands political attachment in terms of an autonomous subject and attributes Macbeth’s demise to an over-susceptibility to natural or supernatural forces. By putting early modern accounts of the humoral constitution of the night air in conversation with modern theories of apostrophe, I argue that the Macbeths’ experiences of night theorize political action as inseparable from the nonhuman forces in the play. Shakespeare reworks his source material to explore the borders of the human, imagining a more complex relationship between treasonous violence and the darkness that enshrouds Scotland.“Macbeth’s Thick Ni…Faculty62936Critical Survey