From a traditionally conservative viewpoint of the Middle Ages concerning a now emancipating individualism, the church still denied the concept of the ‘individual’, since humans were not supposed to innerly see themselves as autonomous and rationally-thinking beings – which was perceived as revolutionary, maybe even seditious – but to act as obedient servants of God and the state who only define, or rather fulfill, themselves through the collective mass of devout Christians.
While humanism strives for the human’s autonomy through power over himself, here in Macbeth – just as, for instance, in King Richard III – the tyrant now becomes the counter-violence through power over others, whose right to self-determination he certainly restricts, or even eliminates, through his mostly aggressive exercise of power, and thus reverses this new development. This constitutes a substitution experience, which modern psychology (Jung, Freud etc.) confirms as well (see Unterstenhöfer, p.192, l.27-31).
“The unmistakable dynamic quality of Elizabethan tragedy comes from the discovery of the individual human character, from a burning interest in its potentialities for good and evil, its corruptibility as well as its exhilarating power to inspire and impress.” (Mehl, p.5, l.26-29).
Nevertheless its emergence was only made possible by the humanistic interest in the fate and psychology of the individual human and the model of Seneca’s tragedies (Fabian (Vol.1), p.391, l.35-37). Similar as with Seneca, whose tragedies were significant for the birth of the Elizabethan tragedy and had great influence on it, the tyrant Macbeth is constantly forced to commit new terrible felonies due to the unnaturalness of his reign. With that, he and his crimes are demonized – a development that culminates in the great tragedies of Shakespeare (Unterstenhöfer, p.192, l.20-26).
The influence of the Senecan Tragedies also becomes effective in Macbeth insofar as that the tragic fall is caused by the hero being incapable of controlling his fierce passions and emotions with his mind – he thus becomes a “slave of passion” (Schabert, p.544, l.16-21). In contrast to the model of Seneca, who equipped his protagonists with an overriding passion – so that they would end up in madness or fury, such as Atreus in Thyestes – the Elizabethan tragedy rather focuses on the ‘functioning’ of humans in general.
4. The Elizabethan Psychology
An all too strong imagination was, according to Elizabethan psychology, perceived as negative and, therefore, had to be avoided by all means since it was thought “that successful action depends upon a well regulated soul and that any departure from the governance of reason is dangerous, […].” (Anderson, p.162, l.10-12).
“The supremacy of the imagination, of the affections, or a conjunction of the two […] is nearly always fatal to an individual; hence this supremacy becomes a dominant force leading to tragedy.” (Anderson, p.172, ll.8-15).
Besides, the clerical doctrine of sin of that time was not familiar with ‘individual’ sinners in the sense of ‘self-identity’. By means of the confession manual – a catalogue of sins, developed in the 15th century, that is oriented towards the Ten Commandments and prepares for confession – for the first time an autobiographic ‘personality’ emerged which, at that time, was imagined as a composition of single virtues and sins. Nevertheless, this certainly cannot be compared to today’s definition of ‘individuality’ – namely “a single person […] as distinct from a group; a person of a particular kind; striking or unusual, original; an independent or unusual person” (Oxford English Dictionary (2012), p.369, individual) – but can, at most, be interpreted as a first attempt of indicating a person’s individual character traits due to good and bad attributes.
Undoubtedly, the contemporary psychology – which traced the diversity of characters back to the physiological conditionality of the inner life, the power of affects as well as the temperaments – provided the impetus for Shakespeare’s realistic, individualizing depiction of the character Macbeth (Unterstenhöfer, p.49, l.15-20).
5. Imagination and Its Significance for Shakespeare
First of all, the ambiguous term ‘imagination’ shall be explained; afterwards, its concrete significance for Shakespeare will be set out. The term covers a wide field and can be interpreted in various ways.
According to the Oxford English dictionary (1989), the term was first attested in the English language in 1340, even with today’s common meaning: “The action of imagining, or forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses […]; the result of this process, a mental image or idea.” (Oxford English Dictionary (1989), p.669, imagination). A splitting of ‘imagination’ into a reproductive and productive variant was also first mentioned in that year. Thus reproductive imagination signifies “that faculty of the mind by which are formed images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses, and of their relations (to each other or to the subject)”. Productive imagination, on the other hand, implies “the power which the mind has of forming concepts beyond those derived from external objects” (Oxford English Dictionary (1989), p.669, imagination).
In philosophic epistemology, imagination – derived from the Latin ‘imaginatio’ (‘imagination’; ‘imaginery’; ‘fancy’; ‘fantasy’ ) – is generally defined as any inner conception without the real presence of an object (Fröhlich, p.150, Einbildung).
Psychologically, imagination is generally defined as the ability to think pictorially. It is a conscious mental process in which visions or images of objects, events, relationships, or procedures arise in the mind that are not present and that the affected person does not have to have experienced or perceived ever before. Therefore it is mostly directed towards the future. This power of imagination outlines the individual manifestation-degree of the ability to develop views or perceptions that exceed memories and realistic ideas – for instance in dreams, visions or hallucinations (Fröhlich, p.151, Einbildungskraft).
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