“Beyond this ignorant present”: the poverty of historicism in Macbeth

Julián Jiménez Heffernan
Additional contact information
Julián Jiménez Heffernan: Universidad de Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain

Palgrave Communications, 2016, vol. 2, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract Although Macbeth is not stricto sensu a history play, its dominant concern with the paralogisms of time forces the reader to reconsider its relationship with history. Moreover, the scarcely noted fact that the debate for and against historicism—encouraged by thinkers like Hegel, Lukács, Strauss, Aron or Popper—tends to capitalize on the hermeneutic affordances of a play like Macbeth, brings the historical (perhaps historicist) provocation of the play all the more sharply into focus. Self-validating prophecy emerges, in this reconsideration, as the pivotal, paralogic speech act in a play that reads like a parody of verification. By exposing the logical complicity between providentialist prophecy and historicist interpretation, this article contends that Shakespeare obtained, in Macbeth, ironic-critical distance from contemporary historiographic teleology and that he thus sheltered himself in advance from the progressive-moralist, at bottom apocalyptic, arrogance of neo-historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt or Richard Wilson. In the final analysis, Macbeth gets the last word, one no oracular predictive or postdictive consummation is able to efface. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/palcomms.2016.54 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:2:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1057_palcomms.2016.54

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.54

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().