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tween them, nor that of King Lear to Othello to the possibility that
Macbeth may have intervened.

But somehow the idea that King Lear was written before Mac -
beth seems to involve more than this. It is a bit like thinking that The
Brothers Karamazov was written before Crime and Punishment. The
analogy is not a casual one. Macbeth, like Crime and Punishment, is a
study of evil through a study of murder. Each is its author's most
rapid, concentrated, terrific, and possibly sublime work. Each is a
prolonged nightmare lifted into the realm of art. King Lear and The
Brothers Karamazov are also studies of evil; but if they sound no lower
depths, they do climb to greater heights than Macbeth and Crime and
Punishment. All four fight through again the old war between light
and darkness. But in Macbeth and Crime and Punishment we have
"night's predominance," as Shakespeare phrases it, and the light is
that of a star or two in the blackness, while in King Lear and The
Brothers Karamazov the stars are morning stars and there is dawn on
the horizon. I know how preposterous this will sound to those who
consider King Lear the pessimistic masterpiece of the ages.


II

If it be true that all art aspires to the state of music, the opening
of Macbeth approximates perfection. The contention of the elements
and the battles of men are the themes of the witches' colloquy. But
their lines are more overture than scene, and the drama has a second
opening in the account given by the wounded Sergeant of Macbeth's
conquest of the rebels. The passage is like a smear of blood across
the first page of the play. The double opening defines precisely what
we are to expect: a work dedicated not to the supernatural nor to
blood but to the relation between the two. (The modern-reader who
is afraid of the word "supernatural" may substitute "unconscious.")
Passion means originally the capacity to be affected by external
agents. In this sense Macbeth is a play about human passion.

It is significant that the witches choose for their fatal encounter
with Macbeth not the hour of battle but the moment

When the hurlyburly's done.

War plows the soil. Who wins is not what counts. It is what seeds
are planted

When the battle's lost and won

-6-

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1987. Page Number: 6.
    
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