All For Love Macbeth Analysis

Rabkin starts his third chapter by criticizing the way plays are criticized. He states that thematic criticism makes itself and literature part of the modern, educated world by making plays seem clearer and more plain than they actually are. The next group of plays to examine are Shakespeare’s tragedies, and the critical versions of them. All for Love and Venice Preserved, improvisatory imitations of Shakespeare, are claimed to be the best tragedies of their time. All for Love was not written to compete with Shakespeare or to imitate, but rather to convey Dryden’s career in tragedy. Dryden’s All for Love is a tragedy that represents a past now lost. The characters in Dryden’s work have already made their decisions and we see them living

Neither the physical deformity or ambition are adequate convictions to his behavior. Only Richard’s pleasure and Shakespeare’s power differentiate Richard from Macbeth. Macbeth’s response to his operation is one of horror. Rabkin enunciates the question of what Macbeth is motivated by; the answer lies in Lady Macbeth’s explanation for her own inability to kill Duncan. She cannot kill Duncan because it would be a form of parricide, and this is exactly why Macbeth is impelled to kill. Rabkin clarifies that this may be the a motive, but the reason he acts in that moment is from the rage of a disappointed sibling; the act of treating Malcolm as a favorite son triggers a murderous impulse. Critics of time have been demonstrating how Shakespeare’s understanding of character is susceptible to psychoanalytic exploration, and how much Shakespeare seems to have predicted modern psychological discovery. Rabkin states that what we find in Macbeth is more of an obscure hinting at motivations that lie buried deep; too deeply to be susceptible of seventeenth-century explanation. Macbeth’s behavior is simply based on unconscious motives that he, himself, is incapable of knowing. Rabkin concludes by saying that human behavior is essentially governed by unknown and unknowable forces from within and