A Tale Told by an Idiot
The Tragedy of Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
edited by Jan H. Blits
Fortune blessed Jan Blits with a rare gift in ordaining that his edition of Macbeth would appear in the same year as Joel Coen’s widely heralded film of the “Scottish play.” The publicity generated by the film, with its eminent director and prominent American actors Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in starring roles, may well have provided a boost in sales for a new edition. Blits’s treatment, however, seems more suited to scholars or graduate students than to an undergraduate in a survey course, much less to a moviegoer who, having seen the film, decides to read the play.
Blits is a very learned man with a distinctive and unusual approach to the play as a treatment of the actual, historical development of Scotland. The interpretive introduction is short, just over ten pages, so most of the learning and the argument for the editor’s reading of the play go into footnotes, which thus take up a third to three-quarters of many pages. There are, indeed, a few pages with only four or five lines of text. This is not an accommodating way for a reader who is not a scholar to experience a complex work of literature.
Palpable Relevance
What, then, we may ask, would such a reader wish to experience in a 400-year-old play? The quick answer is that, like all of Shakespeare’s best works, Macbeth is still timely after four centuries. Its relevance to contemporary events is palpable: as I write this review, for one obvious example, Vladimir Putin is three weeks into his invasion of Ukraine. In Macbeth, Shakespeare aids our reflection on such events by providing a dramatic realization of the grief, devastation, and rage that ambition and anxiety swirling in a single man can visit on an incredulous populace. Macbeth’s encounter with the three witches on the barren heath, agents of spiritual darkness and malice, entice him into the conviction that he is a man of destiny. Wholly absorbed by his irrational compulsion to master and manipulate the fate that is by definition foreordained, Macbeth ceases to ascribe any significance whatsoever to the lives of other men and women.
We can only hope that Vladimir Putin does not come to the same state of desperation as Macbeth:
I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (III.iv.134-136)
What the regicide and usurper is beginning to learn is that the more he asserts his imperious will, the more hopelessly he becomes entangled in the tentacles of unforeseen consequences. In his most famous speech, upon learning of his wife’s suicide, he has reached the abyss of sheer nihilism:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(V.v.23-27)
It is crucial to recognize that this is the voice, not of Shakespeare, but of Macbeth; the cynical despair is the character’s, not the playwright’s. The “idiot” who tells this tale is Macbeth himself. In Shakespeare’s day, as in ours, “idiot” chiefly means someone who acts and speaks in a stupid, foolish, or irrational manner; but the word retains some of the sense of its ultimate Greek etymon, idios: one’s own, personal, private, peculiar, strange; which yields idiotes: a private person, single citizen, bungler, someone unversed or unskilled in anything. Macbeth has seized power over the community, but in doing so he has estranged himself from the community by regarding nothing but his own interests. Thus, he is the idiot who tells the meaningless tale.
Night’s Black Agents
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on literature from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
Misguided Mercy & Dante's Infernal Purgation by Joshua Hren
30.2—March/April 2017
on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
on Costly Grace in Breece D'J Pancake's Flyover Country by Casey Chalk
more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Answers Secular & Religious by Allan C. Carlson
33.1—January/February 2020
Do You Know Your Child’s Doctor?
The Politicization of Pediatrics in America by Alexander F. C. Webster
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
