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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Cut Short All Intermission

  • from Part IV - Memory, Affect, and Stagecraft
  • Edited by Jonathan Baldo, University of Rochester, New York, Isabel Karremann, University of Zurich
  • Book:
    Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England
    Published online:
    07 June 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023, pp 251-268

  • Summary

    At the end of Act 4 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff learns that his wife and children have been killed on Macbeth’s orders. Macduff initially experiences grief as involuntary memory. Malcolm urges Macduff to turn immediately to thoughts of revenge, but Macduff is unable to do so. Like Hamlet although more briefly, Macduff is caught in what he calls an intermission of inaction and feeling, analogous to Lauren Berlant’s impasse. In this brief pause, poetic meter, repetition, and enjambment comprise an affective dramaturgy through which grief, disbelief, and anger can be felt and made into the materials for memory. Macduff’s grief is ultimately assimilated into the structure of a revenge plot, but the moment briefly reveals a different way of speaking, thinking, feeling, and remembering, an alternative to both the gendered, racialized chaos of Macbeth and the gendered, racialized control embodied in Malcolm.