Macbeth and Kierkegaard

Summary

The art of writing lines, replies, that with full tone and all imaginative intensity sound out of one passion and in which there is nevertheless the resonance of the opposite – this art no poet has practiced except the one and only: Shakespeare.

(Kierkegaard, 1848)

I want in this essay to read Kierkegaard and Macbeth as mutual illuminators, examining one in the light of the other. The ambition brings with it basic problems, although of a kind that Kierkegaard himself would dismiss as materialistic frippery. For Kierkegaard assumes – as we cannot – that the inwardness he locates in Macbeth is of the same essential kind as his own. As befits his imperative of urgently self-appropriative reading, his Macbeth is unapologetically his. Kierkegaard wasn’t interested in historical differences between mid-nineteenth century Copenhagen and Jacobean England (and still less eleventh-century Scotland). Kierkegaard is interested only in ‘subjective truth, the truth of appropriation’: his reading always obeys this injunction. The young man’s account in Repetition of how he reads Job might serve to describe all of Kierkegaard’s most passionate textual engagements:

I do not read him as one reads another book, with the eyes, but I lay the book, as it were, on my heart and read it with the eyes of the heart, in a clairvoyance interpreting the specific points in the most diverse ways . . . Now a word by him arouses me from my lethargy and awakens new restlessness; now it calms the sterile raging within me, stops the dreadfulness in the mute nausea of my passion. Have you really read Job? Read him, read him again and again.