Ambivalent Macbeth

R.S. White is Winthrop Professor of English at the University of Western Australia and chief investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100–1800.

• Preface and acknowledgementsPrologue: sinners as heroes1. Contexts of ambiguity: text, sources, history2. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’: the radical ambivalence of Macbeth3. ‘Nothing is but what is not’: emotional worlds of characters in Macbeth4. ‘The seeds of time’ and the Macbeths5. ‘Palter with us in a double sense’: leading ideas – temptation, equivocation, evil6. ‘This is the very painting of your fear’: imagery and the emotional world of Macbeth7. Macbeth on stage and screenBibliographyIndex

‘Having seen two Macbeths already this year ... I was glad to have this exploration of why it is so perennially reinterpretable. … It is informed, too, by his work for the Centre for the History of Emotions, resulting in a fine discussion of the characters’ emotional worlds. Other highlights are the account of the problematics of blending pro-Scot and pro-English sources and of the play’s insistence on the numbers two and three; the performance history; and a revisiting of the almost lost art of the study of Shakespeare’s imagery.’